Unfinished Business

September 23, 2019
In this brief and characteristically pithy collection, critic and memoirist Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City) considers how her responses to particular books have changed over time. What interests her is not discovering that she’d misremembered details of character and story, but finding a new comprehension of a book’s subject, such as realizing that her long-held impression of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’s “overriding theme—of sexual passion as the central experience of a life—was wrong.” With her perspective changing due to time, age, and shifting cultural landscapes, the mature Gornick finds former fonts of wisdom such as Colette now “narrow and confined” and learns she only appreciates Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats after acquiring two tabbies and realizing she “had to grow into the reader for whom the book was written.” Through steady, sculpted prose and elegant readings, Gornick concludes the work of great literature is less about “the transporting pleasure of the story itself” than revealing readers to themselves, a process of self-discovery she relates to her description of Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua’s characters as “women and men, just out of Plato’s cave... moving blind toward some vague understanding of what it is to be human.” The insights in this rich work will be appreciated by Gornick fans and bibliophiles alike.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
Gornick's (The Old Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection. Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice--a publication that "had a muckraking bent which made its writers...sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society's head"--here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture." Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful--or as uncompromising--as Gornick, which is to readers' good fortune.

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Starred review from January 1, 2020

Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City) describes herself as someone who reads to "feel the power of life with a capital L." In nine essays, the author candidly discusses her rereading of literary works during different moments in her life by authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, J.L. Carr, Colette, Marguerite Duras, Natalia Ginzburg, Thomas Hardy, and Doris Lessing. Synthesizing the various writings, while simultaneously describing how her interpretation of the texts has changed with each rereading through a personal, feminist, and postmodern lens, Gornick expounds on D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and the experience of identifying with a different character each time. Books she disliked or misunderstood decades before were appreciated after a second reading as a result of life experience or change (including the adoption of two cats). Gornick recognizes that in that initial encounter, one might not be emotionally ready to appreciate a work fully, but with each rereading will recognize a new literary element or better understand a particular protagonist no matter how many times the book has been perused before. VERDICT A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2019

Among our most distinguished critics, Gornick uses nine essays blending literary analysis, depth-plumbing memoir, and biography to reconsider the books that have shaped her life. She finds herself in the conflicted characters of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, her sense of womanhood in Colette's The Vagabond, and her crazy felines in Doris Lessing's Particularly Cats while soaking in the works of Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, and Natalia Ginzburg.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.