The Odd Woman and the City

Starred review from April 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.

February 15, 2015
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.

December 1, 2014

Josh Levin teaches ESL classes in Chicago while dreaming up off-kilter ideas for screenplays he'll never pursue. But when he becomes involved with one of his students, a Bosnian woman with a violent husband, life's absurdities suddenly seem less frothy than dangerous. Hemon returns to fiction after The Book of My Lives, a National Book Critics Circle finalist, as were his novels Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, which was also a National Book Award finalist.

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