Publishers Weekly
★ 04/13/2015
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)
From the Publisher
“[F]unny and elegiac and truth-dealing. . . . It's a slim book with big echoes. . . . What puts The Odd Woman and the City across, however, is how deeply Ms. Gornick gets into the fat of feeling. She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[An] elusive and stirring memoir” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“[Vivian Gornick is] a kind of ambassador for those most contested, conflicted of American genres, the personal essay and the memoir.” —Emily Stokes, The New York Times Book Review
“The best books, like the best friends and their best emails, like the most intimate and comforting conversations, make us feel understood. They make us feel like home is home. The Odd Woman and the City can be read as a guidebook for how to exist.” —Katherine Taylor, Los Angeles Times Review of Books
“Gornick's most ambitious attempt yet at the nonromance plot . . . richly felt.” —Laura Marsh, The New Republic
“A series of sharply observed vignettes.” —The New Yorker
“In an age of often pointless confessional writing, Gornick remains a master of purposeful personal narrative.” —Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly
“One of the most vital and indispensable essayists of our cultural moment.” —Phillip Lopate
“Reading [Gornick] is a thrilling, invigorating, challenging experience.” —Barbara Fisher, The Boston Sunday Globe
“Vivian Gornick . . . has produced a new volume in the stubbornly candid, piercingly intelligent voice that informed her literary essays and criticism. . . . a ferocious intellectual inquisitiveness and a lifetime affair with a city where Gornick's aliveness, her alertness are rewarded daily.” —Misha Berson, The Seattle Times
“Gornick explores the ebb and flow of relationships with a blunt yet emotionally deft hand.” —Jenn Fields, The Denver Post
“[A] marvelous new memoir . . . Yes, we fall in love with Vivian Gornick - her chutzpah and fine mind, her wit, perseverance and resolve.” —The Buffalo News
The Boston Sunday Globe on Vivian Gornick Barbara Fisher
Reading [Gornick] is a thrilling, invigorating, challenging experience.
Los Angeles Times on Vivian Gornick Susie Linfield
Vivian Gornick's prose is so penetrating that reading it can be almost painful.
Phillip Lopate on Vivian Gornick
One of the most vital and indispensable essayists of our cultural moment.
The Boston Sunday Globe Barbara Fisher
Reading [Gornick] is a thrilling, invigorating, challenging experience.
Los Angeles Times Susie Linfield
Vivian Gornick's prose is so penetrating that reading it can be almost painful.
Phillip Lopate
One of the most vital and indispensable essayists of our cultural moment.
Kirkus Reviews
2015-02-05
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.
