Einto a bad little girl, cruel and beautiful, a girl who always thinks she is better than her family and eventually, sinking into a deep swamp, ends up in the demon realm, where she is transformed and henceforth trapped with mud and snakes around her neck remains: a wild children’s story with far-reaching impact. “I could feel the girl who wanted to be beautiful. A mother to love it, a demon to torment it. I felt the characters in my mother mix so much that I couldn’t tell them apart.” This is how Alison, the narrator, remembers at the beginning of this novel what her mother used to read to her. And so the novel immediately leaves a trail that we as readers can also follow if we want to abandon ourselves to its many twists and turns and wild mixtures without reserve.
The story he conveys to us only gradually comes together as a patchwork of reminiscences, fantasies, longings and fears. Alison is in her late forties and has been living her real life for twenty years. Aging, sick, impoverished and lonely, she ekes out her days in a Californian coastal town and lives mainly on memories. What she otherwise needs to live, she has to earn by cleaning an office, which a discarded lover gave her to. But she can only get through the physical exertion of cleaning with painkillers. Hepatitis C and a poorly healed fracture from an accident have ruined her body.
Fast crash from the glamor world
This dreary existence provides the novel with the framing and contrast foil to tell Alison’s eventful life at a young age. From a variety of set pieces and individual chunks of memory that seem to erupt like magma and swirl wildly around each other – “the glistening, glowing past breaks into the present again,” it says at one point – a mosaic is put together that has something to do with the history of has in common with the girl who sinks into the swamp. But the novel does a lot to ensure that we should also imagine this child as a happy person in the demon realm.
Mary GaitskillVeronica. Novel. Translated from American English by Daniel Schreiber. Blumenbar, Berlin 2022. 301 p., hardcover, €22.
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Image: flower bar
Originally from New Jersey, Alison fled her family to San Francisco as a teenager to try out the free life with sex and drugs and to make a living selling flowers in front of nightclubs. Through contacts of a sleazy agent who grabs her between the legs, she becomes a fashion model, jets to Paris and quickly ascends into a glamorous world of stars and fashion photographers. But the daily enjoyment of champagne, coke and truffle pie only awakens a longing for the simple chemical taste of American pies from the local supermarket.
In any case, the crash follows quickly. The boss of the model industry, for whom Alison served as a secret lover, dumps her, cheats her out of her money and prevents her further career. So she tries to make a fresh start in New York with a college visit and an office job. Here she also gets to know Veronica, a much older colleague who wears cable-knit sweaters with colorful animals, loves opera and in many ways has a completely different life plan. At first, Alison can hardly hide her contempt. But the contrast increasingly attracts them, and a real friendship develops. Veronica falls ill with AIDS, the new plague in the 1980s, and Alison accompanies her friend on her way to death. Decades later, when Alison herself has long been ill, her feverish thoughts revolve around this farewell.
Inexorable chronicler of our instinctual world
The novel thus finds its actual theme late in the game. For a long time he swirled his different fragments of narrative around each other, combining the touching (like the memories of the sisters) with the repulsive (insights into the Parisian sadomasochistic milieu) and the typical of the time (New York bohemian eighties) and overall made sure that we see ourselves like that Girls from the children’s story feel and can hardly tell things apart.
Everything is told in a language rich in metaphors, often luxuriantly proliferating, which Daniel Schreiber, who has long championed the author Mary Gaitskill, has ruthlessly translated into German. Sometimes haunting images emerge like this: “Carelessly discarded trousers tried to escape from the couch; withered clothes snored on kitchen chairs”, sometimes to heated city prose: “The summer was humid and hot. The city exhaled, farting and sweating through the bars of its concrete cage like a giant beast of flesh and steel, glass and stringy hair. It gave off a tremendous stench, a jumble of many little smells—flowers, dirt, cars, trash, piss, and food.” And sometimes just to style blossoms: “Our conversations were like torn paper, reeling in the torrent of our forward-looking united intentions. “
Hard sex, battles between the sexes and drugs: these have been the hallmarks of Mary Gaitskill (born 1954) as a relentless chronicler of our instinctual world since her debut volume “Bad Behavior” from 1988. With the new German edition of this story collection three years ago and with “Das ist Lust”, a narrative contribution to the MeToo debate, Blumenbar-Verlag started inviting people to discover their texts. But just before the impression of these strong and deeply disturbing stories, the novel “Veronica”, originally published in 2005, seems much weaker. Perhaps concise forms are better for the author. What is memorable are isolated passages. As a whole, her novel seems undecidedly reeling and too erratic to ever be carried along in its current.
Mary Gaitskill: „Veronica“. Roman. Translated from American English by Daniel Schreiber. Blumenbar, Berlin 2022. 301 p., hardcover, €22.