Picking up the pieces

MARY Gaitskill’s novel “Veronica,” darkly spirited at times and at others unutterably dark, recalls Robert Frost in his best or worst Grim Reaper mode:

The witch who came (the filthy hag)

to wash the steps with pail and rag

was once the beauty Abishag.

Except that this is Abishag’s story.

“Veronica” offers a tale of the past as seen through a fuzzy scrim of the present. It takes place a ruinous quarter-century after the bright 20s and dimming 30s of its protagonist, Alison. Now in her 50s, painfully crippled in one shoulder and suffering from hepatitis B, the onetime fashion model and jet setter earns a small income cleaning a friend’s office. Time sequences are a bothersome tangle in a novel whose insights cohere better than its structure. The present here unfolds entirely through the filter of a long walk.

That walk begins as Alison leaves her shabby apartment in the suburb of San Rafael, north of San Francisco. The smell of fried chicken liver greases the hallway, while a neighbor takes daily plunges into the sewage-filled canal below. Clutching a red umbrella, Alison makes her way through a bleak Antonioni-like landscape of highways and dreary storefronts, and then up into the piney hills. As she walks, she remembers and reflects.

What she remembers becomes the substance of the novel, an unsparing portrait of the fads and fashions of the 1970s, with their illusions of freedom and unbounded conquest. Alison’s life is a reverse ride up the medieval wheel of fortune: from its sundown tumble into decay and death back to its noontime glory and then to its early hopes and strivings. Here, however, the glory and the hopes are compromised by what comes afterward, a desperate descent into vainglory and self-betrayal.

At 15, Alison runs off from her suburban New Jersey home and the quarreling of a self-willed mother and a kindly, seemingly will-less father. At the time, this seems an escape from a dragon’s cave; now, Alison recognizes that the real dragons were outside and they all have all but destroyed her.

She finds her place among the waifs in San Francisco, where she peddles flowers in front of restaurants, is picked up by a phony models’ agent who seduces her, and eventually returns, battered, to the suburban cave. A set of photos sent to a competition pays off: She wins a job with France’s most powerful fashion agent.

Gaitskill’s plotting is frail; in effect, it is a series of opportunities to illustrate the lethal vanities of a generation. What follows is a gimpy fable. Alison enters a spinning world of luxurious, Champagne-filled exploitation. Alain, her boss, is an almost impossibly cartoonish version of the charming, ice-cold French seducer. She glories in his attentions for a while; then he discards her, fires her and steals her savings.

Although she retreats home again, she can’t shake her high-life addictions and eventually heads off to New York in pursuit of “life, sex and cruelty.” After working as an office temp, she settles for modeling work of a far less glamorous kind than she is used to -- “I was a shopgirl, not a poet,” she reflects. She takes up a series of friends and lovers, and things go gradually downhill until a car crash cripples her and ends her career.

All this is told in pain and self-disgust: the successes and loves as well as the defeats and betrayals. Yet, there is a kind of reverse undertow to this dismal tide. As Alison continues to walk, she thinks about the commonplace life she’d once rejected, professing to find there the foundations of stoic acceptance. The effect is something like Elizabeth Bishop’s “The art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (write it!) like disaster.”

There is a new understanding of her loving but indecisive father. There is new respect for the inner strength of an ugly-duckling sister. Above all, there is an appreciation of those whose lives were tragically touched by AIDS (Gaitskill makes it the symbolic scourge of her generation’s indulgences) who fashion a new courage beyond it.

One is Joanne, who fills her large, untidy house with warmth, needy hangers-on, children who wander through and lunches of carrot sticks, apple juice and sandwiches cut in triangles because kids like them that way. In her youth, Alison would have despised these as fatuous suburban frills; now they are the stuff of life.

Another is Veronica, ungainly, irreverent, self-destructive and, in the old Archy-and-Mehitabel sense, toujours gay. Alison’s sometime co-worker, she defies her outraged friends to take a bisexual lover and knowingly contract his disease. For her, he is a modern-day Camille who, dying of consumption, becomes love’s very distillation.

All this is perhaps willed rather than demonstrated. Veronica, like virtually everyone else here, including Alison and even Joanne, conveys more meaning than actual human presence. We see her standing for; we don’t see her standing, which makes her use as the book’s title character seem oddly starved. Gaitskill is at her best writing short stories that stun and disconcert like flashes of lightning. Yet, in this longer form, the flashes seem to come from several different directions at once. They dramatically illuminate; at the same time, they often confuse. *