22 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
signature style, the blunt, declarative
beat that she would perfect in “Fierce
Attachments,” repeating rhythms and
phrases as if to get her own melody into
her head. Here, as elsewhere, her prose
can sound a definitive, almost doctri-
naire note. What saves her from a ten-
dency toward dogma is a stronger urge
toward revision and reconsideration.
She likes to be right; but she loves to
find that she was wrong.
The new generation of American
radicals who have embraced “The Ro-
mance of American Communism” may
be surprised to learn that Gornick is
skeptical of their politics. In Decem-
ber, Jewish Currents, a revived, millen-
nial-run leftist quarterly, called her, along
with other Jewish figures of her gener-
ation, to ask what she thought of Ber-
nie Sanders. Not much, came the an-
swer: “He’s old and he’s Jewish and he
rants and he raves.” Gornick told me
that she was ashamed of the interview.
“It sounds terrible—not only harsh, but
vulgar.” (She is as free in her speech as
she is guarded and deliberate in her
writing; the first trait probably explains
the second.) Had there been a back-
lash? I asked. She paused. “No ...” She
maintains that neither Sanders nor his
supporters are actually socialist—“no-
body wants to overthrow the system;
on the contrary, they want to make it
work more equitably”—and if they were
she wouldn’t vote for him anyway. She
is casting her lot with Elizabeth War-
ren, not that she thinks it will count for
much. A month before the brouhaha
over what, exactly, Sanders had said to
Warren concerning the electability of
women, Gornick told me that she
thought neither a woman nor a Jew
could win.
Is this kind of thinking pessimism,
or the pragmatism that follows the col-
lapse of a revolutionary dream? Gor-
nick writes about the end of second-
wave feminism as if the tide simply
went out, imperceptibly but steadily,
until she once again found herself stand-
ing alone on dry land. Fellow-fighters
retreated into the privacy of their own
lives. Baffling complexities cropped up;
nuance leaked in. She still speaks with
embarrassed regret about a polemic that
she published in the early eighties in
the Voice proclaiming herself against
marriage, a position that she now con-
siders strident to the point of absurdity.
And at some point she started to feel
that men were also worthy of liberation
from the suffocating status quo—that
they had to be encouraged to become
full people, too.
Easier hoped than done. Like other
feminists of her generation, Gornick
looks at the #MeToo movement with
a mixture of admiration, reservation,
and suspicion. She understands the
anger, but she thinks the approach is
too grim and censorious, at once too ag-
gressively scattershot in tactic and too
limited in scope. This may have some-
thing to do with Gornick’s view of erotic
life as a battlefield, often for the worse—a
wonderful essay in her 1996 collection,
“Approaching Eye Level,” describes her
summers working at Jewish resorts in
the Catskills as a Hobbesian hunting
ground, the rich guests intent on hu-
miliating the poor staff, and the male
staff intent on crushing the women—
but also, sometimes, for the better. The
other week, she told me, she had been
interviewed by a young woman. “I said,
‘I want to see men and women treating
each other like fellow-creatures, noth-
ing else’”—a favorite Gornick formu-
lation. “I then said, ‘And of course that
means a lot of erotic excitement goes
out of the world.’ And I started to laugh.
She said to me, ‘Is it worth it?’ And I
said to her, ‘You tell me.’”O
ne thing that has never disap-
pointed Gornick is New York.
Gentrified, torn down, and built up
again with a bank on every corner, it’s
still her town, and she still finds her
people in it. She is an inveterate walker
of city streets, and her best writing cap-
tures that rhythm, with something to
notice and delight in on each block. In
“Fierce Attachments,” she balances her
memories of childhood with descrip-
tions of conversations she had with her
mother as an adult, the two of them
walking for miles in Manhattan, the
city at once a buffer and a bridge be-
tween them. In “The Odd Woman and
the City” (2015), a lovely late bookend
to the earlier memoir, her walking com-
panion is Leonard, a gay friend who is
as much of a misfit in his way as Gor-
nick is in hers. They are both loners, al-
ternately content and dissatisfied in
their isolation, wanting to be in theworld and apart from it at the same
time. But they have the city and its life
for consolation. “It doesn’t change in
the sense that it never stops being ex-
pressive,” Gornick said, when I asked
her how she makes her peace with cor-
poratized New York. “There’s never a
time when whoever is on the street is
not acting out. It’s the most acting-out
city in the world.”
While she was writing “The Odd
Woman and the City,” Gornick kept
notes on things she had seen on the
street, snippets of conversations to tran-
scribe, a look she noticed on an unusual
face. She doesn’t do that anymore. She
is trying to feel her way toward some-
thing new, but she isn’t sure what it
should be. In the meantime, she is work-
ing on an article about Storm Jameson,
a forgotten English writer who pub-
lished dozens of middling books and
one extraordinary memoir. She should
be able to relax a little: in addition to
the publication of “Unfinished Busi-
ness” and the reissues of “The Romance
of American Communism” and “The
End of the Novel of Love,” the Times
named “Fierce Attachments” the best
memoir of the past half century, as nice
a laurel to rest on as any. But Gornick
is frank about her disappointment in
herself. She feels that she should have
done more with her gift: “I berate my-
self tremendously for not having writ-
ten all that I think I should have writ-
ten, and not having written more
important books.” Writing has always
been torture for her, and it still is. Rather
than feeling enclosed in sacred mental
privacy, she usually feels exposed, under
the gun. “It’s terrible, not to be able to
work every day, but every day, in my
long writing life, to come up against
the fog in the head,” she told me. “The
inability to think, to write another sen-
tence. There are many days when I don’t
write anything. But I always sit down
at the desk. Absolutely. Every morn-
ing, religiously.”
One of the cats appeared, rubbing
her neck against Gornick and imme-
diately becoming aloof again. As we
had been talking, the light had drained
steadily from the room. Gornick got up
to switch on the lamps, and I got up to
go. The afternoon had given way to
night, and in the morning there would
be more work to do.