In “City Of Girls”, Elizabeth Gilbert tells a fast-paced story of the free life in the 1940s.
It is the last year before the United States entered World War II. Summer 1940. The western campaign has begun in Europe, the German Air Force begins to bomb London and other English cities.
Vivian Morris, however, does not notice any of this. She has other problems and doesn’t even hear the “pulse of history” “when it is pounding right in my damn ears”. The 19-year-old has just been thrown out of college and spends the first two weeks of June after returning home “throwing a tennis ball against our garage wall and whistling ‘Little brown Jug’ over and over again until my parents finally do it were sorry and took me to my aunt in town ”.
Aunt Peg and a friend run the “Lily Playhouse” in New York, a tinkering theater that is past its prime. “The walls were covered with nicotine-yellowed paintings of bare-breasted nymphs frolicking with gangs of satyrs. Other murals showed muscular men with heroic calves wrestling with sea monsters in a way that seemed more erotic than brutal. ”Vivian is fascinated by the world of theater. And that summer of 1940, when she was “nineteen years old and a fool,” she plunged deep into New York’s den of sin. Sex, drinks and jazz are her drugs, and the country girl in the buttery yellow summer dresses she has sewn becomes a femme fatale in no time at all, who never avoids trouble.
Elizabeth Gilbert: City Of Girls. Roman. A. d. Engl. v. Britt Somann-Jung. S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2020. 492 S., 16,99 Euro.
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The first-person narrator in Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel “City Of Girls” depicts Vivian’s nocturnal experiences with gangsters, gigolos and staunch office stallions in a gorgeous comic manner. Always by her side: the show girl Celia, a temporary friend, hungry for life and willing to take risks like herself. “I think it was our fear of boredom that motivated us above all else. Every day had a hundred hours, and we had to fill them up so that we wouldn’t go by in sheer weariness. ”
Best-selling author Gilbert, best known for her novel “Eat Pray Love”, masterfully succeeds in capturing the heated atmosphere of that summer when life was raging in New York and two young women discovered sex without a marriage license long before the flower power movement. But at some point the fun will come to an end for Vivian too. After a scandal that makes it to the New York newspapers, she returns to the provinces. Soon afterwards she set off again for New York, the city of her life, which she will not leave until her death.
Vivian is 90 years old at the end of the novel, which is a full life confession written for the daughter of the only man she has ever loved. He is a World War II veteran, injured in body and soul. For years Vivian wandered with him through the New York at night without touching anything other than the back of his hand. She becomes a woman capable of love and friendship. Without foregoing the fun she gets from other men.
“City Of Girls” is a fast-paced, wonderfully narrated performance ride through the first half of our century. And: It is the manifesto of a self-confident, emancipated woman who takes what she wants. At the end of the novel, old Vivian looks back self-critically at the escapades of her younger self. What have you learned in a long, self-determined life? “The world doesn’t follow a plan. Things happen to people – things they cannot control. ”Vivian Morris knows what she’s talking about.
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