The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

I loved To The River, which I read in 2016, and have been meaning to read more by Olivia Laing ever since. Mum and Dad got me The Lonely City (2016) for Christmas, and I was really intrigued by the premise: Laing looked back at living alone in New York and feeling desperately lonely, linking this to the lives of other people who have experienced or depicted the same thing.

If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean that one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

At its best, The Lonely City is philosophically interesting and personally engaging. I’m not sure I agree with everything she says above (well, mostly the idea that depression is not related to chemistry) but she has a novel and well-constructed way of looking at complex issues like loneliness. Having never experienced loneliness for any length of time – I live alone and love it – I find it a fascinating topic.

The people Laing considers here are chosen from the arts, and have very different experiences They are Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Klaus Nomi, Josh Harris, and Zoe Leonard. Some of these are household names, while quite a few were new to me. In each case, she looks at how their work and their personal lives reflect a sense of isolation – from society, from acceptability, from human contact. Some of these require more of an imaginative leap than others, and it is a very intriguing combination of subjects. They are too disparate for me to go into too much depth here, but Laing writes vividly and sympathetically about each of them – this is not just biography, but a psychological exploration done with a kind eye.

What I thought was so good about To The River was how Laing managed to weave together her own life and her journey with many other elements – Virginia Woolf’s life, the discovery of fossils, and everything in between. It was seamless and beautiful, bringing it all into an evocative and cleverly constructed tapestry.

Sadly that isn’t really true of The Lonely City. If I hadn’t read To The River before, I probably wouldn’t have noticed – but this feels like an early prototype for that sort of book, even though it came later. (It also reads a lot like a doctoral thesis turned into a memoir, but I don’t think that is what it actually was.) Laing compartmentalises her life and the lives of her subjects, often giving her experiences for a handful of pages at the beginning of a chapter before moving on to the subject. It means that the book is rather disjointed and episodic.

Each chapter is fascinating in its own right – the life of Andy Warhol is extraordinary, for instance, while Laing’s discussions of Hopper’s paintings are engaging, original, and often quite moving (even if I had to google each of the paintings she was talking about, as there aren’t any pictures in this book – in the paperback, at least). But I do wish that she had found a way to incorporate her own experiences more organically, and to create a book that flowed as smoothly as To The River.

There is a lot to love in The Lonely City, and some impressive insights. I’m not sure she succeeds in combining the personal, the biographical, and the general – though the final few pages (from which I drew the quotation above) are so well done that you’ll almost believe that she does.