I’m only buying 24 books this year, and so naturally I’m choosing them carefully. I knew I had to have The Odd Woman and the City (2015) by Vivian Gornick when Jacqui wrote a brilliant review in January (and it certainly didn’t hurt that it had been republished by Daunt Books, who have impeccable taste). Now I’ve read it, and Jacqui didn’t put me wrong – it’s brilliant.
The Odd Woman and the City has the subtitle ‘a memoir’, but it’s only a memoir in the loose sense that it’s non-fiction and in the first person. Don’t come here expecting to have anything you might traditionally expect in a memoir. Anything we learn about Gornick is picked up almost by accident, in amidst the things that she thinks are more important – or perhaps I should say, she recognises that things like friendship, city life, and literary appreciation are more significant markers of a person’s life than date of birth, list of publications etc. etc.
The Odd Woman and the City isn’t told in fragments in the way that Blue Postcards was – it feels more linear than that – but it is still built up impressionistically, weaving between reflections on friendship with a man she loves but brings out her negative side, to comments overheard as she walks through New York, to analyses of books she has loved from Middlemarch to Isabel Bolton to George Gissing’s The Odd Women that inspires Gornick’s title. Her main subjects are right there in the title: herself, and New York.
I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center of the world and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby.
At fourteen I began taking that subway ride, walking the length and breadth of the island late in winter, deep in summer. The only difference between me and someone like me from Kansas was that in Kansas one makes the immigrant’s lonely leap once and forever, whereas I made many small trips into the city, going home repeatedly for comfort and reassurance, dullness and delay, before attempting the main chance. Down Broadway, up Lexington, across Fifty-Seventh Street, from river to river, through Greenwich Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side, plunging down to Wall Street, climbing up to Columbia. I walked these streets for years, excited and expectant, going home each night to the Bronx, where I waited for life to begin.
I have never been to New York, and I don’t particularly want to. I am emphatically not a city person and I never intend to live in one again (my 13 years in a city as small as Oxford were proof that I wasn’t built for city living). Gornick even commits the cardinal sin of saying that the Bronx is ‘like a village’, which is the sort of thing people say about areas of cities if they have never lived in a village. And yet I loved reading about Gornick’s thoughts on city life – the people she knows, the people she overlaps with, the communities that have battled through modernity and the ones that have been lost. She scatters in amusing or unusual New York moments in between longer self-examinations, as though she is walking through the city, lost in contemplation, and occasionally interrupted by something significant in front of her.
On upper Broadway a beggar approaches a middle-aged woman. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I just need –’ he starts. To his amazement, the woman yells directly into his face, ‘I just had my pocket picked!’ The beggar turns his face northward and calls to a colleague up the block, ‘Hey, Bobby, leave her alone, she just got robbed.’
She is excellent at immersing us in different worlds, whether that is particular streets or particular milieus. Some are more sustained – towards the end of the book there is a poignant recollection of seeing a friend delivering a Samuel Beckett monologue after having been severely invalided by a stroke. Some are only in passing, but Gornick is brilliant are using all of the elements to build up a picture of her life. Her sense of rhythm and pace – whether of sentences, paragraphs, or whole sections – is exhilirating.
She is remorseless is self-examination – though I did enjoy the contradiction of nearby sentences that ‘It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are’ and ‘No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am’. What an irony – to create a memoir while saying that she does not understand herself, and that you shouldn’t believe her even if she said she did. But somehow both those statements get to the heart of what The Odd Woman and the City is: more an exploration of the questions you could ask about your life, your friendships, your connections, your city, your home – and less about any concrete conclusions. Gornick resists writing the traditional, solid memoir on firm foundations, and the result is excellent. The book is somehow sturdy in its fluidity.
In conclusion, Jacqui was right, of course. This book is a marvel.