Gaitskill, Mary. Veronica. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Some writers are able to write novels. I'm not one of them (yet). Some writers, when they write the novels I'm not yet able to write, write them with structures that aren't conventional or traditional, but rather complicated and intuitive with respect to the specific demands of their subject. I'm not one of these writers either (of course, because this kind of writer exists as a subset of the previous kind of writer, so logically if I'm not the former I can't possibly be the latter, much like how as I'm not a rectangle, I can't also be a square).

Joan Didion is such a writer, and though it's not a novel the best example of such story structuring can be found by taking even the most cursory look at the essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", in which the writing all splintered and sudden and detached from the project at hand, in order to embody the mood of San Francisco, 1967.

Mary Gaitskill is such a writer. Her book is about modeling and casual drug use and AIDS and hepatitis, mostly in the 1980s, but spanning before and after, and she's able to hop decades between paragraphs in a way that's never jarring but rather sensical. She has to jump time this way, it's like.

I don't know what else to say. This book is very good. It doesn't put the tsk in Gaitskill, it puts the skill in Gaitskill.