The 1960s and 1970s would seem to be made for novelization. The upheavals of those decades present an appealingly ambiguous synchronicity of outer conflict and inner turmoil, but writers of all kinds become sycophantic to the potent popular culture of the era. Those writers who succeed do so because they admit and then reject these potencies, like wised-up lovers.

Writing about her suspicion of the paranoia of those times, Joan Didion claimed, “I wanted to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.”

Alison Owen, the narrator of Mary Gaitskill’s excellent new novel, “Veronica” (Pantheon, 230 pages, $23), develops a similar alienation after running away from her family’s commune and spending several years as a debauched model in Paris. Her chief metaphor for experience is feeling an electrical current, and her metaphor for beauty is a closed door.

“Veronica” is a short novel, told in flashbacks as Alison, sick now with hepatitis and a damaged rotator cuff, lives in a community of dying artists in San Francisco.

“My ambition was to live like music,” she says of her early days as a runaway. As a child, Alison had been impressed with the sublime discretion of postwar singers like Jo Stafford, but the music of her teenage years troubled her: “The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad … and then sailing off on a crystal ship.” In the main part of the novel, Alison remembers the late ’70s, “a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too … there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty.”

Alison’s story wrestles with that beauty. In modeling, Ms. Gaitskill has found a counterpoint for the usual squalor of countercultural novels, and the fashion world provides Alison with a controlling metaphor for the chaos. “There is always a style suit, or suits,” she considers. “When I was young, I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically – people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras – I thought the world had changed.”

The Veronica of the title is a friend who dies of AIDS at about the time Alison’s youth and runway career come to an end. Veronica is a bohemian hippopotamus, an older woman determined to be ugly and distinct among her circles of arch-gay men and aging artistic strivers. She is gentle, smug, coarse, and sentimental, possessing an “armor of pain sculpted to look like sophistry.” She keeps her bisexual boyfriend, knowing that she will contract the disease.

“Veronica” has three levels: the slick fashion world, Alison’s self-conscious and slightly oracular autobiography, and Veronica’s upsetting manners. At her funeral, Alison testifies to Veronica’s spirit: “Once when I’d complained about a feeling of tightness in my forehead, [she] said, ‘No, hon, that’s your sphincter.’ ” Alison has experienced ample scatology in the ironic dressing rooms of Paris, but Veronica teaches her that life is bigger and less fun than fashion.

The dimensions of “Veronica” defy reproduction. Ms. Gaitskill has arranged brash characters in subtle relationships. Written with economy and intellectual confidence, “Veronica” retains some of the magic of those colorful times but remains skeptical and claims a large private region in which its own concerns win all our attention.

***

If Walter Kirn’s previous novel, “Up in the Air,” satirized so much of modern life that it seemed easy and obvious, his new novel represents a refined aesthetic, weird to the point of palatability. “Mission to America” (Doubleday, 320 pages, $23.95) envisions a 150-year-old sect, the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, which emphasizes diet, matriarchy, and acceptance.

“We approved of the Prince of Flocks, whom others call Christ,” explains Mason LaVerle, the young narrator, “but we also approved of a host of other divinities, majestic and humble, familiar and obscure, from tricky Old Coyote, the Hope spirit, to dainty Lady Vegetalis, a garden sylph of cloudy origins.”

Mr. Kirn’s fantasy religion is neither a spoof of current fads nor a send-up of fundamental Christians, though his satire borrows from both streams. Fearful of incestuous dilution and encroaching media, the AFA sends Mason and several other young men in search of outsider brides and money. They quickly succumb to fast food, and moral degradation follows quickly.

Greater America is a mystery to the boys, and Mr. Kirn employs his comic talent to paint a moral critique of the country in vivid paranoid lines. Some of the middle part of the novel drags, but in the end, common sense seeps up like groundwater. Mr. Kirn’s novel succeeds at its zany extremes, when he describes Mason’s religion, and at its calm center, while his lampoon of contemporary America is a tasty filler.

blytal@nysun.com