There is a rare breed of writer whose books defy easy categorisation, their subjects prone to meandering in an intellectually driven stream of consciousness across the page. They may touch upon fiction, memoir or even philosophy, but they delight mostly because they reveal a brilliant, and idiosyncratic, mind. In the UK there are, among others, Deborah Levy and Geoff Dyer; in the US, Sigrid Nunez and Vivian Gornick.
Gornick, 89, is a celebrated American writer not much known on these shores, although her work is diligently being resurrected by the wonderful Daunt Books. Having previously put out Fierce Attachments, the much-praised 1987 memoir about her complicated relationship with her mother, now it is republishing The Odd Woman and the City, a 150-page essay (originally published in the US in 2015) that casts Gornick as a modern-day flâneur traversing the streets of her beloved Manhattan, aiming both to keep loneliness at bay and to feed her insatiable writer’s curiosity.
“In the 1740s,” she writes, “Samuel Johnson walked the streets of London to cure himself of chronic depression.” It was amid its open sewers and pestilence that he came to conclude “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. Gornick feels similarly of New York, a city she believes people flock to because they need “evidence of human expressiveness”.
Here, she finds that expressiveness in spades. In lieu of plot or structure – the absence of which only heightens the book’s charms – she simply wanders the sidewalks, often alone, occasionally in the company of her deadpan gay friend Leonard, while recalling things that happened to her yesterday, or decades ago. There are recollections of her childhood, her erratic parents, and how some of the best sex she’s had occurred in NYC hotels after a long liquid lunch.
“Before I was 35, I had been as much bedded as any friend, and also twice married, and twice divorced,” she writes, before concluding, “I didn’t care if I never again got into bed with a man.”
She recounts how becoming a noted writer hardly broadened her horizons – “Nobody read me above Fourteenth Street” – and how she is routinely harangued by homeless people, whom she harangues right back. She delights in an exchange at the grocery store where a man is given $8.06 in change instead of $8.60, the customer far more entertained by the cashier’s numerical dyslexia than the cashier herself. Idling at a traffic light, she admires a pair of shoes she considers “beautiful and complicated”, but when she asks the wearer if they’re comfortable, the wearer reels, shrieking: “Why are you asking me that?”
It is in these quotidian encounters that life itself gradually unfolds, confounding at times, but stimulating, too. Like the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, who wrote about Manhattan in the 1950s, and Fran Lebowitz, who does likewise today, Gornick revels in the telling detail, the pursuit of which helps to illuminate the world and its tribes. Her Manhattan is quite mad, but gloriously so.
“Every night when I turn the lights out in my 16th-floor living room window, I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding around me… human hives hanging anchored in space. The pleasure it gives is beyond all explanation.”
Much the same can be said of her writing.
The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick is published by Daunt Books (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
