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Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

by Vivian Gornick

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 161 pp., $25.00; $16.00 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Verso, 265 pp., $19.95 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 164 pp., $15.99 (paper)

by Vivian Gornick

Picador, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper)

From birth to death, writes Vivian Gornick, in her memoir The Odd Woman and the City,

we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and dont want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressionsanger, cruelty, the need to humiliateyet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.

From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we dont want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities, she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.

But then there are times when we feel ourselves whole. We stand at the center of our experience and something inside us flares into bright life. Under the influence of a conviction of inner clarity, we become eloquent, prolificwhat Gornick calls our expressive selves. This, we feel, is the meaning of life. This is what it means to be alive.

Gornick has published thirteen books in fifty years, fourteen if you count Woman in Sexist Society, the anthology of feminist writing she coedited with Barbara K. Moran in 1971. Most concern someone whose quest for the expressive self rises to the level of an addiction. In a new introduction to The Romance of American Communism, her 1977 book reissued earlier this year, Gornick observes that there is a certain kind of cultural herothe artist, the scientist, the thinkerwho is often characterized as one who lives for the work. This hero is her subject. Why do people devote their lives to causes that deprive them of love and comfort and ordinary happiness, Gornick asks? As a lifelong writer, a woman of blunt manner and deep feeling for whom the effort is agony, she has a personal investment in the answer.

Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership. In 2015 The Odd Woman and the City introduced her to a new generation. In 2020 four more Gornick titles have given occasion for a backward glance: Unfinished Business, a new bibliomemoir about rereading, and reissues of Approaching Eye Level (1996), The End of the Novel of Love (1997), and The Romance of American Communism. The timing of their publication could be chalked up to the return of American socialism, or to the tendency to rediscover women artists in old age. But the lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel expressive: to experience the feeling that tells a person not approximately, but precisely who they are.

Because

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The Desk and the Daring | by Dayna Tortorici - The New York Review of Books