Vivian Gornick doesn’t need a pedometer. She goes and goes and goes through her hometown of New York all her life. A couple of hours every day. Then she looks and collects, picks up observations and scraps of conversation, marches against her own anger and possibly burgeoning depression. The street is her home; it is only there that the city to which she has dedicated her book, “A Woman in New York”, manifests itself.
Born in the Bronx, the writer has lived in the West Village for 40 years, in a high-rise building on the 16th floor. When she looks out the window, she enjoys the panorama – but, she says, the view does not affect her mood. On the other hand, when she comes down to the street, she is different after two minutes. A loner, charged with the energy of the people around her.
It is similar to reading the narrow volume. Vivian Gornick may be 85 years old, but her language is so fresh, her gaze so curious, the dialogues so lively that while reading you have the feeling of being injected with energy. Just the start with her gay friend Leonard, who accompanies her through the book, single like her, with whom she is once again sitting in a restaurant – her New York is not the city of dinner parties, they can only go wrong from her point of view.
A city of friends
Like many New Yorkers, Gornick prefers dining out to the public. So when she asks her friend Leonard at the beginning how he is doing, he replies: “Like a chicken bone that got stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow it nor spit it out. At the moment I’m just trying not to choke on it. ”
Gornick’s New York is clearly a city of friends, not families. From their point of view, you don’t need them here. “The Odd Woman and the City” is the original name of the band. As a headstrong woman, divorced twice, she feels at home in the city that allows her and others of her kind to be what they are.
The “New Statesman” once described Vivian Gornick as “one of the greatest writers you have probably never heard of”. In Germany she became known last year with her furious book “Ich und Meine Mutter” (Me and My Mother), in which she has already marched extensively through the streets of New York, alone or with that mother with whom she has so much in common, her love for the city and her Joke as well as their neuroses and the left attitude.
Vivian, a child’s pain in the ass, turned into a full-blown urban neurotic who, of course, is a fan of the Woody Allen films from the 70s and 80s. Just like for the director, New York means above all Manhattan to them.
The Bronx – a village
As a child, the Bronx was a village for her and Manhattan the center of the world, her Arabia. That’s where she wanted to go, she made it. Vivian Gornick is celebrating a Manhattan that many believe has long been lost, corrupted by the omnipotence of money. Even if many artists and bohemians have been driven out, especially in their neighborhood, the West Village, there is still a spirit of non-civic freedom for the feminist, colorfully mixed and tolerant.
But the author also emphasizes the democratic nature of this city, where she messes with Arthur, the beggar in her neighborhood, and overhears an elegantly dressed elderly lady on Park Avenue who says to her friend: “In my youth, men were the main course , today they are just the set. “
The book draws on Gornick’s whole life – not just from memory, but from the notes she kept making. The memoir is a kaleidoscope of stories, some of which are no longer than a paragraph, others stretch across pages; those from childhood are particularly intense. Just as she roams the streets, criss-cross, she also wanders through the years and the literature that has shaped her.
Cultivated solitude
It is about love affairs and lust, including their disinclination, be it anal intercourse or physical possession, friendship and loneliness. Gornick writes about the pain that goes with it and, at the same time, the unwillingness to forego this loneliness in a city where she always had an intelligent person to talk to.
Although the cultivated solitude did not make her an egomaniac. The Jewish woman’s heart beats to the left, her demeanor has remained as social as she was shaped in childhood. A scene in front of the soup kitchen that others might not even have noticed is unsentimentally moving.
“A Woman in New York” appears at the right time because you can’t go to New York. And maybe, even if you could, you don’t want to go there anymore. She wrote it before the pandemic. In an interview, the author tells what she missed so much during the long lockdown in New York: the people on the street. No people, no cars, nothing but surreal silence. “Only then does one understand what New York is all about: the crowd.”
Vivian Gornick: A woman in New York. From the American English by Pociao. Penguin Books, Munich 2020. 160 pages, € 20.
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