A past of 'rich things,' and a harrowing present

Veronica
By Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon, 227 pp., $23

Readers unfamiliar with Mary Gaitskill need only, perhaps, look at the titles of her three previous books to get an inkling of her preoccupations: her story collections ''Bad Behavior" and ''Because They Wanted To," and her first novel, ''Two Girls, Fat and Thin." A further clue is that one of her short stories was adapted into the indie film ''Secretary," a piquant little romance involving sadomasochism. Indeed, those books established Gaitskill as a literary provocateur, a queen of squirmy perversion. Strippers, hookers, runaways, junkies, punks, dirty old men -- Gaitskill used them to explore the urban gutter of sexual power games and abuse. Not always a pretty picture, but not one given purely for prurient effect. The stories artfully walked the wild side in order to reveal a yearning for intimacy beneath the surface pathologies.

In her new novel, ''Veronica," coming after an eight-year absence, Gaitskill dutifully dips into her catalog of outré details. There is sex and depravity aplenty, along with the requisite scatological references. There's even a visit to an S&M club. Yet there is something much more in this novel. The kinky pyrotechnics have been toned down in favor of a wiser, more meditative perspective. Gaitskill taps into a deeper vein of emotional force, and with vivid language and an absorbing architecture, she delivers her most affecting, sophisticated work to date.

In the simplest terms, ''Veronica" is about one day in the life of the narrator, Alison Owen. Forty-six years old, living in San Rafael, Calif., she is destitute and ill. Already on disability with a mangled rotator cuff, in the past year she has become beset with symptoms of hepatitis C. She can't sleep, racked by dreams, and needs fistfuls of codeine to make it through the day. On this rainy morning, she begins thinking about a friend, Veronica Ross, from her long-ago time in New York. They had been unlikely companions, Alison 21 and beautiful then, Veronica 37, plump, loud, a rather appalling sight with her bad makeup and clothes. They had met when Alison, in a fallow period in her modeling career, was temping at an ad agency where Veronica worked as a proofreader. She would eventually die alone of AIDS, ''ugly and sick." Now that Alison is confronting her own mortality, her face ''ruined . . . broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks," she is visited by memories -- not only of Veronica, but of her childhood and modeling days in Paris and New York during the reckless excess of the 1980s.

Particularly in the first half of the novel, Gaitskill shows a bravura technical virtuosity in interweaving these competing narratives, mirroring the ricochets of Alison's addled mind. Alison might feel that her focus is slipping, wherein ''the order of things is changed" and ''the people and places in it are sliding around indiscriminately," yet the reader never feels displaced, and is pulled along by the mystery of how she gets here from there, from growing up in New Jersey to running away to San Francisco to modeling in Paris, where she is immediately swept up by the fast life. Alison becomes the mistress of the head of her modeling agency, Alain, who ensconces her in an opulent apartment stocked with cocaine, marzipan, and syringes of antibiotics for the clap. ''I loved the rich things and the money and people kissing my ass," Alison admits. ''I loved the song I was living in." Ultimately, however, she is exploited and disgraced, and is forced to return to New Jersey.

To Gaitskill's credit, Alison's family home isn't depicted as a clichéd den of maltreatment and dysfunction. It's more complicated than that, and more real, her mother, father, and two sisters all suffering from vague discontents, feeling they are being crushed by a dull world. It's the same kind of restlessness that led Alison to leave in the first place, ''longing to live inside a world described by music," a world in which there are ''no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty." Trying to settle into an ordinary existence, she goes to community college, studies word-processing, and applies for secretarial positions, but eventually resumes modeling, seduced by the parties, the clubs, the fame. It all comes to a quick end, of course -- ''Honey, your look is dead," a booker pronounces when she is 25 -- and as it does, Alison becomes closer to Veronica. Although she often regards her with disgust, Alison is drawn to the older woman out of curiosity and, when Veronica contracts HIV from her bisexual boyfriend, out of pity.

Here the novel comes up a bit short. The friendship, with its complex dynamic, isn't filled in with the sustained narrative or scenes it deserves, and the same could be said of the depiction of Alison's current life. The intent might have been to parallel the way her past subsumes her present, yet, compared with the vibrant sections in the first half, the second half peters out disappointingly, reduced to one-paragraph fragments that describe her feverishly climbing a hill in a lush canyon preserve -- too meager, not to mention too obvious a symbol.

What does come through fully, though, is Alison herself. Despite all the confessions of her ''vanities" and ''passive cruelties," we end up caring for her as she tries to reconcile her life and salvage some hard-won beauty and humanity. She is alone, but she reflects, ''It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible."

Don Lee is the author of ''Country of Origin," which won an American Book Award.