Review by New York Times Review
VIVIAN GORNICK'S NEW MEMOIR, "The Odd Woman and the City," has an unusually large cast of characters. There is her mother, the subject of her memoir "Fierce Attachments," and her friend, Leonard, a gay man, whom she meets once a week. There are the people she sees at parties and the two men she was married to, briefly, in her youth. There are her lovers - one of whom we might recognize for his habit of telling women what they want (in "Fierce Attachments," a glass of wine; in this memoir, anal sex) - and the couples whose relationships she likes to analyze with friends: "Who would have written this story, Wharton or James?" Then there are the authors she cites - perhaps 40, including the little-known New York novelist Mary Britton Miller and the poet Charles Reznikoff - as well as fictional heroines such as Rhoda Nunn, the protagonist of George Gissing's novel "The Odd Women" who, like Gornick, renounced marriage and motherhood with consequences she could not foresee. Like a painting by Bosch, Gornick's New York is full of cleverly drawn little figures: a hippie dentist on 14th Street telling her to "let it all go"; a cross-dresser on the corner of Seventh who calls to the skies, "I have so many enemies!" GORNICK, THE AUTHOR of 11 other works of nonfiction including biography, sociology and criticism, has over the decades become a kind of ambassador for those most contested, conflicted of American genres, the personal essay and the memoir. Starting with her Village Voice column, which followed the feminist movement in the '60s and '70s, she has written what Elaine Blair has described as "personal criticism," a form that makes its arguments using both anecdotes from life and examples from literature; she experiences her reading sensuously, almost physically (Norman Mailer's novels, she recently wrote, left "the taste of ashes" in her mouth). Even when she is not writing directly about her own experience, Gornick's work always feels like an intimate disclosure; whether her subject is the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman or the prudish Clarissa Dalloway, we sense that she is also exploring her own suffering and desire. "The Odd Woman and the City" is written in undated fragments - a few as short as jokes, others more like essays - that orbit several themes: the pleasure of daily interactions with strangers, the oddities of life as a single woman. The memoir opens with a warning that some scenes and characters are composites, which readers might in any case assume: Gornick's Manhattan is a charming city in which people speak a little like New Yorker cartoons and never use iPhones. (One of her exes, on the other hand, speaks like her: "Why did you keep making scenes until all I had left was the taste in my mouth of your unholy dissatisfaction?") A few scenes are lifted from Gornick's essays of the past two decades, in particular the beautiful "On the Street" from 1996, but are dreamily presented as if they might have happened last week. Analyses of Gissing and Seymour Krim are also borrowed from earlier work. Really, then, this is a kind of memoir-anthology: a composite Gornick. The effect of all the hopping between present and past is like that of a psychoanalytic monologue, a mind circling a central question: How did I come to be this way? Slowly, there emerges a self-portrait of the author, a proud woman who lives in a sparsely appointed apartment in Greenwich Village, who gets into arguments on the bus about loud cellphone conversations, who looks forward to joining the throng of people on the street during the long afternoon walk that is her break from writing. At a certain point it becomes clear that this populous book is about being alone. This is strangely devastating. Writing about aloneness is an interestingly difficult task, like writing about air or the color white. Gornick mostly knows better than to confront it head-on; instead, she lets it seep into her descriptions of other phenomena: the intensity of her reading and friendships, her sensitivity to company. After one evening "full of irony and negative judgment," she experiences - in her almost synesthetic way - the aftereffects of Leonard's strident conversation as a kind of smarting that leaves her wanting to recover in solitude until their next meeting. "Nothing serious," she writes, "just surface damage - a thousand tiny pinpricks dotting arms, neck, chest." Her strolls through New York City cast Gornick as a flâneur - but one looking to insinuate herself into the scenes she describes. On the subway, she watches a man and his deaf and deformed son speak in sign language, entranced by the way they are "humanizing each other at a very high level." In line at the pharmacy, Gornick laughs with an old woman and a gay man over a shared history of "lousy lovers": "When the howling stops, we are all beaming. Together we have performed, and separately we have been received." Her memoir gains its tension from the threat of impinging loneliness, its joy from the encounters she forges on her own, nameless, on the street. The essays circle a central question: How did I come to be this way? EMILY STOKES is articles editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 21, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gornick, a discerning and sharp-tongued literary critic (The Men in My Life), writes of her lifelong love affair with her native New York City. Gornick, who was born in the Bronx, introduces her prickly friend Leonard, a perpetually disgruntled gay man about her own age who shares with her "a penchant for the negative," and employs him as a "mirror image witness" to her melancholy, solitary nature. Compulsively judgmental of friends and family (including her aged mother, who was the focus of her Fierce Attachments), Gornick delights above all in reporting snatches of dialogue and startling encounters that reveal a human expressiveness. Such raw moments include a conversation with her 90-year-old neighbor, Vera, who bemoans the sexual ineptitude of the men of her generation, and a lively exchange of sign language on the subway between a father and his disabled son. Gornick is admittedly lonely and sometimes befuddled by her feminist ideals, questioning her youthful belief that solitude was preferable to romantic love without equality. Gornick returns to many of the writers whose own quirks and grievances have obsessed her (Seymour Krim, Henry James, Evelyn Scott, and George Gissing, whose novel The Odd Women gave Gornick her own book title) and finds their voices reassuring and full of nuance, need, and the pain of intimacy-much like the voices of the city she craves. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Life inspired by the buzzing humanity of a great city.Gornick (Emma Goldman, 2011, etc.) takes her title from George Gissing's novel The Odd Women (1893), about a "darkly handsome, high intelligent, uncompromising" woman who scorns "what she calls the slavery of love and marriage." Courted by a man who respects and excites her, she insists on independence, fears her own emotions and retreats from their relationship. Like Gornick, a "raging" feminist in the 1970s, Gissing's heroine "becomes a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which so many of us have found ourselves, time and again." Regret, anxiety and nostalgia inform this finely crafted memoir, built of fragmentary reflections on friendship, love, desire and the richness of living in New York. For the author, New York is a city of melancholy, peopled by "eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvelous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eye of the stranger." At times, she walks more than six miles per day, daydreaming, observing and trying to "dispel afternoon depression." She interacts with beggars and shopkeepers, overhears snatches of conversation and revels in a city that she admits to romanticizing. "If you've grown up in New York," she writes, "your life is an archaeology not of structures, but of voices, also piled one on top of another, also not really replacing one another." Gornick chronicles ephemeral relationships and thwarted love affairs and, in particular, her friendship with Leonard, a gay man who, like Gornick, has "a penchant for the negative." They meet weekly, unfailingly, "to give each other border reports." Her friendship with Leonard leads her to consider Henry James' relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, "a woman of taste and judgment whose self-divisions mirrored his own." A gentle, rueful, thoughtful memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
