THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 19
nick’s building is undergoing a face-lift),
which allow her to look west onto her
beloved New York, and her bookshelves,
their contents recently thinned and re-
organized with the help of an assistant.
Gornick didn’t feel sentimental about
getting rid of so many of her books. She
has a good sense of which ones she can
forget about and which she’ll want to
return to. In fact, she has just written
her own book about that, “Unfinished
Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader,”
which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will pub-
lish this month. The idea for it came
when a friend invited Gornick to reread
“Howards End,” which neither of them
had looked at in decades. She was
shocked to find how different E. M. For-
ster’s text was from her memory of it.
So she decided to revisit books that had
influenced her in one way or another,
and to write about what she found in
them, and in herself. The result is a hy-
brid of Gornick’s two genres, criticism
and memoir, and it puts the reader in
mind of the Nelson Mandela quotation
about returning to a place only to find
out how much you yourself have changed.
As she writes of reading the Italian mas-
ter Natalia Ginzburg, “First time around,
my eyes were opened to something im-
portant about who I was at the moment
of reading; later, to who or what I was
becoming. But then I lived long enough
to feel a stranger to myself—no one
more surprised than me that I turned
out to be who I am.”
S
he has reason for surprise. What Gor-
nick turned out to be—a woman who
makes her living by writing, who is child-
less and happily divorced, who lives alone
without suffering stigma for it—is a phe-
nomenon of the twentieth century, a
creature who didn’t exist in the Bronx
of her youth, where women were wives,
widows, or wives- and widows-to-be.
She likes to call herself an “odd woman,”
a label borrowed from the title of an 1893
novel by George Gissing that deals with
the first breaths of the modern feminist
movement in England. It is a way of ac-
knowledging the previous generations
of independent women whose shoulders
she stands on, as well as the degree to
which she still feels herself to be a per-
son apart in her own time.
As a girl, Gornick grasped that
work—the kind that happens out in the
world, not just in the kitchen—was im-
portant in leading a full life. During the
Second World War, her mother, Bess,
took an office job with a uniform man-
ufacturer in Manhattan, where she had
the exhilarating, purposeful experience
that so many women of her generation
did when the men went off to fight. Viv-
ian, eight or so, was thrilled that her
mother was out of the house, but her
father wasn’t, and he made Bess quit.
This may have been the only act of ma-
chismo ever displayed by Louis Gor-
nick, a kind, mild-mannered man who
labored five days a week over a steam
iron in the garment district. He and Bess
came from the Russian Empire; as she
writes in “Unfinished Business,” Gor-
nick and her older brother were “shaped,
throughout our lives, by our parents’
anxiety-ridden experience of life on the
periphery.” But within the self-contained
universe of their building Bess Gornick
was at the center. She was one of the
only women in the building who spoke
English without an accent, and she kept
house ruthlessly, always kneading, wring-
ing, or scrubbing something, all the while
pushing herself into the neighbors’ busi-
ness. “Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they
performed on a Dreiserian scale,” Gor-
nick writes of the women around her.
“And I—the girl growing in their midst,
being made in their image—I absorbed
them as I would chloroform on a cloth
laid against my face.”
When Gornick was thirteen, her fa-
ther died, of a heart attack, and her child-
hood came to an abrupt end. Bess took
to the living-room sofa and refused to
get up, moaning in agony at her aban-
donment. This situation lasted for years.
Bess had idealized not only her hus-
band but the idea of love, and without
an object to receive it her adulation be-
came hysterical. “Fierce Attachments”
is an unflinching book; there is real re-
pulsion in the way that Gornick writes
of her mother’s abject wallowing, and
horrified awe at the duration and the
commitment of the performance. Bess,
however, did one thing right by her child:
she insisted that she pursue an educa-
tion. Gornick enrolled at City College,
and her world bloomed. Taking the sub-
way from the Bronx to Manhattan every
day was like going from Kansas to Oz.
At graduation, Bess was distressed to
discover that her daughter had spent
four years as an English major. What
were you supposed to do with a degree
like that? She had thought Vivian was
training to become a teacher.
I asked Gornick how she knew that
literature was something worthy of study.
She looked at me as if I had asked how
she knew that clean water was good to
drink. I felt ashamed. Like her mother,
I was thinking in terms of the market,
and she in terms of the soul.
“Because it was so thrilling. Because
it made me feel alive,” she said. “And as
if I was in the presence of exciting and
absorbing realities. The way people feel
when they get religious. I felt that there
was a story beneath the surface of or-
dinary, everyday life. And the books con-
tain that story. And, if I can get to it,
life will be rich.”
T
he other reason that Gornick wanted
to study literature was that she
wanted to be a writer. She had known
desk ecstasy, the feeling of the world dis-
appearing as you till your mind for the
page, and once you experience that it’s
hard to do anything else with your life.
But how to go about being a writer pro-
fessionally took her a long time to figure
out. During the two and a half years of
her first marriage, to a painter she met
while she was in graduate school at
Berkeley, she mostly banged her head
against the wall. The marriage didn’t fare
any better. Before the couple wed, they
were young bohemians on the make,
eating together at the kitchen table
straight from the pot. After, her hus-
band expected her to have dinner ready
for him every night, like some starched
suburban housewife. (Something simi-
lar happened to Lee Krasner and Jack-
son Pollock, and we know how that story
ended.) Gornick went along with it—
for a time. His expectations were hers,
too. “Love (as we had been told since
infancy) was the territory upon which
our particular battle with Life was to be
pitched,” she writes, of her indoctrina-
tion as a girl in the forties and fifties.
“The promise of love alone gave us the
courage to dream of leaving these cau-
tion-ridden precincts in order to turn
our faces outward toward genuine ex-
perience.” So Gornick didn’t just want
to give speeches after all. Passion would
be her ticket into the world.
Literature magnified this idea to a
