Mary Gaitskill's Veronica is an uphill climb. At least it is for Alison, a fiftyish woman, who hauls her rickety body up a steep slope to wash the windows of an ex-lover, John. He's a photographer who speaks in hapless, flapping platitudes. (Of his awe at his newborn child, he coos, "I want this house to be a house of love.") Going about her purgatorial duties, Alison is plagued by hepatitis C and a bunged-up, sore arm. More than that, she is burdened by memories of Veronica--the kind of older lady who referred to everyone as "hon" and quacked out of the side of her mouth, "I'm familiar with Jimmy Joyce and his use of the semi-colon."

Alison, we soon learn, crash-landed out of the world of big-time modeling into Veronica's shlumpy, fluorescent-lit office. There, in a temp job at an ad agency, she found herself magnetically pulled into an inexplicable friendship with this loud, clumsy, absurdly self-important woman. Alison goes on to unfurl a dual portrait of diminution: Veronica's disintegration into the final stages of AIDS, and her own loss of youthful beauty. By the end of the book, both will have become luminous, waking ghosts.

Consider, for instance, how Alison sees a couple of horny teens cutting up at a party:They didn't touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They danced to [the music's] secret personality--clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.Here, as elsewhere, Gaitskill uses language to peer into humiliating places that are too deeply buried and move away too quickly for everyday articulation. It's a trick of masters such as Nabokov and Updike, but what's uniquely exciting about Gaitskill's writing is that she abjures those authors' gentlemanly, lord-of-the-manor vocabulary. Instead, she sticks to sentences that a hot, slovenly, swollen-with-feeling teenage girl (the archetype of the Gaitskill protagonist) could absorb in a single glance. The result is a style that feels constantly harrowing and terrifying, the level of insight so precise as to be almost blinding.

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