Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from Mary Gaitskill…
Is it possible to loathe a book and yet still be overwhelmingly impressed by the author?
That is certainly how I felt after reading the novel Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (pictured above). She published the book in 2005, but I hadn’t heard of it, or her, until I saw a recent recommendation in the New York Times. (The book appeared in a story headlined something like, “the best 100 novels of the last 25 years.” I’ve lost the reference so I can’t remember the exact wording.)
The novel tells the story of Alison, a teenager who is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion – modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City and befriends Veronica, an older eccentric. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, but I found the story ridiculous and the characters completely unlikeable.
Still, Mary Gaitskill writes like a dream. Here are my favourite bits of figurative language from her book:
- She proofread like a cop with a nightstick.
- The music was like a big red flower you could disappear into. The sweetness of it was a completed burst of little taste, but under that was a big broad muscle of sound.
- We drove home through a whooshing tunnel of traffic. It was dark, with bright signs and lights flying by. Daphne sat up front and talked light and fast, turning her head to scatter her words in the backseat and out the window, into the whooshing tunnel.
- My mother came in wearing a pantsuit that was too short for her high heels. Her eyes looked like her leaping voice, and she walked like she was trying to go three ways at once.
- The agency person was a woman with a pulled-back, noisy face. Her suit looked like an artistic vase she’d been placed in up to her neck.
- Denise was even taller and thinner than I was. Her round face and huge frantic hair sat atop her fleshless body like a large flower on a drooping stalk.
- His voice was like an oily black machine operating a merry-go-round of music flying on grossly painted wings.
- A man with a face like the bottom of a broken shoe discreetly worked around me, slowly and painfully collecting cigarette butts off the ground and storing them in his pocket.
- My relations with other models were warm and dull as a hair dryer’s drone.
- We were waited on by severe middle-aged women who wore their dowdiness as if it were a starched uniform.
- Sadness brimmed; it bore up my hate like water bears ice and carries it away.
- He carried himself like a dandy, but rawness hung off him like the smell of meat.
