The Odd Woman and the City (Vivian Gornick, 2015)

I thought this would be much more about walking the city than it was. It does include a few city anecdotes (mostly from Manhattan buses, curiously enough) but mostly it is a sort of meandering memoir-ish writing with thoughts and recollections from Gornick’s life. You could do worse than spend a few hours in Vivian Gornick’s meandering memories, because they often entertain and give pause for thought. A frame story is her ongoing friendship with a man called Leonard, and from there she comments on past zeitgeist, the New York of old, 2nd wave feminism, old lovers, and letting life slip out of your hands. The Odd Woman of the title comes from a passage on George Gissing. Gornick seems to have quite the interest in Victorian fiction, as it comes up again and again. She pontificates on Charles Dickens, Henry (and William) James, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, but also later writers like Edmund Gosse, Isabel Bolton and Seymour Krim (!). Gornick was born in 1935 and is still going strong, publishing her latest book earlier this year, a book of new readings of books she read and reassessed.