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Book Review: City of Girls
Sep. 27th, 2019 08:14 amIf it sounds like I’m being self-deprecating about my appearance, I’m not. I’m just relaying the facts of my figure: I was long and tall, that’s all there was to it. And if it sounds like I’m about to tell you the story of an ugly duckling who goes to the city and finds out that she’s pretty, after all - don’t worry, this is not that story.
I was always pretty, Angela.
What’s more, I always knew it.
This excerpt more or less encapsulates Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, City of Girls. It captures the frame story: Vivian Morris, now in her nineties, is writing the story of her life for Angela, although precisely who Angela is we don’t discover till the end. (I made a few guesses over the course of the story and all of them were wrong.) It mentions the city: New York City, where Vivian moved in 1940 after she failed out of Vassar, to live with an aunt who owned a small theater. (The time frame may lead you to expect this to be a World War II story, but in fact the bulk of the action takes place before the US enters the war.)
Most of all, it captures Vivian’s voice: lively, self-assured, aware of the stories that other people may try to impose on her life. An older woman reminiscing, mostly fondly, occasionally wryly, about her life as pretty girl on the make in mid-twentieth century New York City, where she fell in with the theaters’ showgirls (in particular the effervescent Celia Ray) and threw herself into a whirlwind life of nightclubs, sex, and all-night drinking.
I picked the book because I read an interview with Gilbert where she commented that she wanted to write about so-called “bad girls” without the characters getting their comeuppance: illegitimate babies or venereal disease or death by serial killer or any of the dozens of things that society warns young women will fall to their miserable lot if they sleep around. It’s still rare, even now, for a book’s heroine to be so uninhibitedly sexual. Usually such a character (if she got a positive portrayal at all) would be stuck as the “slutty best friend.”
The evocation of the theater world of New York in the mid-twentieth century is also wonderful. You feel that you could step through the page into the Lily Theater.
The book loses some of its impetus once we leave the theater world, but it remains highly readable, and I very much recommend it.
I was always pretty, Angela.
What’s more, I always knew it.
This excerpt more or less encapsulates Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, City of Girls. It captures the frame story: Vivian Morris, now in her nineties, is writing the story of her life for Angela, although precisely who Angela is we don’t discover till the end. (I made a few guesses over the course of the story and all of them were wrong.) It mentions the city: New York City, where Vivian moved in 1940 after she failed out of Vassar, to live with an aunt who owned a small theater. (The time frame may lead you to expect this to be a World War II story, but in fact the bulk of the action takes place before the US enters the war.)
Most of all, it captures Vivian’s voice: lively, self-assured, aware of the stories that other people may try to impose on her life. An older woman reminiscing, mostly fondly, occasionally wryly, about her life as pretty girl on the make in mid-twentieth century New York City, where she fell in with the theaters’ showgirls (in particular the effervescent Celia Ray) and threw herself into a whirlwind life of nightclubs, sex, and all-night drinking.
I picked the book because I read an interview with Gilbert where she commented that she wanted to write about so-called “bad girls” without the characters getting their comeuppance: illegitimate babies or venereal disease or death by serial killer or any of the dozens of things that society warns young women will fall to their miserable lot if they sleep around. It’s still rare, even now, for a book’s heroine to be so uninhibitedly sexual. Usually such a character (if she got a positive portrayal at all) would be stuck as the “slutty best friend.”
The evocation of the theater world of New York in the mid-twentieth century is also wonderful. You feel that you could step through the page into the Lily Theater.
The book loses some of its impetus once we leave the theater world, but it remains highly readable, and I very much recommend it.
