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Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
Pantheon
October 2005
Featuring: Alison; Veronica
240 pages
ISBN: 0375421459
Hardcover
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Contemporary
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronicaβan older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal βoffice kitβ and a plaque that reads βStill Anal After All These Years.β Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alisonβs reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronicaβs terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time. Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soulβs hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and loveβs abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - December 22, 2005
Fresh Air - NPR - November 21, 2005
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