The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City moves to the tempo of the streets it adores. It bustles, it pulses, it strides ahead and falls back; it marches and dances, hops from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from square to park to station. Then there’s the people, the stream of faces that pass through, the characters that we encounter once, maybe twice, maybe never again, that form a collage of vignettes as much about human nature as it is about urban life. This is an eccentric, fragmented, witty homage to the most iconic city in America’s cultural fabric: New York.
Drawing influence from George Gissing’s classic depiction of the late-Victorian New Woman, The Odd Women, Gornick reflects on her long-term status as a single woman living out her independent life in a city crammed full of lonely souls. A radical seventies feminist, Gornick declares that she once revered single life as a liberating rejection of misogynistic tradition. However, she later admits that she never quite shakes the yearning for romantic love, that it’s ‘injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions.’ This nuance, the tension between political ideology and emotional experience is what makes the book engaging. Gornick’s feminist, socialist beliefs are often in conflict with the things she enjoys or desires, making for an honest dissection of life as an older, single woman.
There is one great love affair in this novel, however: between Gornick and the city. Gornick adores the thrumming beat of urban life. For her, passing an anonymous stream of faces does not highlight her loneliness or render her apathetic, as it did for modernist writers. Instead, it makes her feel more connected, more at one with a current of beating hearts, united in their individual isolation. Without being overly sentimental, Gornick demonstrates how there is great beauty to be found in chaos, celebrating the revitalising power of true friendship and waxing lyrical about the magic of simply walking New York’s street open-eyed and ready to greet the unexpected.
Sadly, her compassion for the masses doesn’t always translate into empathy for the individuals she encounters, as in one scene when she confronts a black man on the bus for being too loud. When he responds by calling her a bitch, she phones the police on him, forcing all the passengers off the bus while they wait for the officers to arrive. The dissonance here between Gornick’s professed socialist-feminism and her apparent ignorance as to the import of phoning the police on a black man for being too loud is disappointing. The misogynistic slur is overshadowed by the sudden oxymoronic fragility of a woman who elsewhere glorifies the bustle, clamour and multiplicity of the melting pot.
Overall, however, this is fundamental reading for all those who dare to strike their own path, grappling with the loneliness that can accompany non-conformism.
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