The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 April 2021
by Vivian Gornick
Cities are living things made up of living things. Some people are exhausted by cities, their grit, their unending energy, the danger, the challenge to one's sensibilities, the fear of the new, the charge of the new. Some people are enchanted by these very same things. Cities are lively. They can be overwhelmingly frightening as well as overwelmingly joyful. Some cities pull that off better than others. We aren't drawn to Boise as much as to Savannah, though both have their points. Some cities rise above the rest, of course, world capitals of urban life. Paris, Mumbai, Tokyo, and, of course, New York City. A city one loves can feel like a family, frustrating but enfolding. It is what characterizes our lives and sends us out into the world to experience, learn and to return home. Cities have just as many faults as families, though, and can be troubled, violent, broken, a place to escape from as much as to harken back. Vivian Gornick, known for powerful memoirs about life and learning, shows us, here, how New York gives her the energy to encounter the world and the comfort to be alone in it.
This is the first of Gornick's books this reader has read. She has a history of well-received memoir and biography. In this book, she is very much a product of her city, growing up in the Bronx, carrying on a writing career in Manhattan, and exploring its streets like a true flâneuse. New York is a compelling walkable city, its short vistas full of life and event, the kind of thing that feeds the imagination of other people's lives and what our own lives can be. Gornick sees that, and it is expressed in the encounters she relates here, along with her memories and the idiosyncratic friendship with Leonard, who appears here to regularly cast light upon Gornick's reflections with blunt humor. It is a slim volume, but it is packed with potent intimacies, literary asides, political jabs, and a sense of evolving identity throughout. She takes in the city and responds to those who critique her love of the place (as if anyone who hasn't experienced it could truly understand what it is like to love New York).
"Most people are in New York because they need evidence -- in large quantities -- of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot."