Reading List: Veronica
Why can’t I resist buying contemporary novels at thrift stores? I don’t know, but my latest was Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, which I picked up at Value Village in Richfield, Minnesota, a couple weeks ago.
I read Gaitskill’s book of stories, Bad Behavior, a while back and liked it a lot. By comparison, this one was a let down. Gaitskill’s writing is dense and a little fussy, each paragraph crammed with images and ideas. I don’t mind that so much, but I was never convinced the main character and narrator was bright enough to have written the words on the page. In fact I never could figure out the main character.
I’ve found I deplore almost all characters in modern novels, and I didn’t care for these either. Their experience of the world is so different from mine, which makes me wonder if maybe there’s something wrong with my view of the world. Maybe I’m the one who is warped and inconsistent and all these hateful characters represent the world as it really is.
