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The Men in My Life (Boston Review Books)
by Vivian Gornick
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Product Description
Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort.
Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that "ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright." Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers—talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known—she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons.
In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.
Praise for The End of the Novel of Love: "[Gornick] is fearless.... Reading her essays, one is reassured that the conversation between life and literature is mutually sustaining as well as mutually corrective."
—Elizabeth Frank, New York Times Book Review
"Reading [Gornick] is a thrilling, invigorating, challenging experience."
—Barbara Fisher, Boston Sunday Globe
"Vivian Gornick's prose is so penetrating that reading it can be almost painful.... [This book] stands out as a model of luminous clarity."
—Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times
Praise for The Solitude of the Self: "I love writers who treat thinking as a dynamic process. Ms. Gornick does—here and in all her books. Imagine a photographer of the psyche. She studies her subject from all angles. Whether in close-up or on a landscape crowded with political and religious movements, she explores the public and private selves.... What a potent book this is!"
—Margo Jefferson, New York Times
A Boston Review Book
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Average Customer Review:
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Personal and Sweet Conversation About Books by Certain Men, 2008-10-24
Vivian Gornick knows the personal value of reading literature, and it's great to have another book of essays on literature by her, even if the reader is left hungering for more than she actually gives of the personal perspective of Vivian Gornick herself in this particular work.
The men in her life are twelve literary figures, most of whom no longer are living but nonetheless are the subject of nine chapters (the Preface counts as Chapter 1), the longest chapter being the essay devoted to Philip Roth (living) and Saul Bellows (deceased).
The first four essays are wonderfully intimate, instructive, and stunning, devoted as they are to the psychological fascination and personal meaning inherent in the writings of such unique writers as George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Lorein Eisley, and Randall Jarrell. Through these essays we come to value them as Outsiders who are capable of revealing their inner lives truthfully and courageously and thus inspiringly to future readers.
The reader anticipates that the rest of the book will carry these same kinds of psychological and personal-value excavations with the remaining writers as with the first four, but the reader will be disappointed for this (unwarranted) anticipation.
The remaining five essays embrace rather a public and impersonal viewpoint, not an intimate one, thus valuing the sociological, academic, and historical perspectives for writers Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, already mentioned, Allen Ginsberg, Rayond Carver, Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, and finally (Chapter 9) James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul.
Whereas Vivian Gornick seems personally driven by her own sense of being an Outsider to find the special weaknesses (like her own) in literary men whose written lives she finds personally fecundating, creative, and endlessly enriching (namely the first four men in her book, especially George Gissing), the last eight men in her life -- and for this book -- seem to have been chosen for examinations and analyses of male weaknesses that are terminal and whose writings are suspect for their mere temporalness, limitedness, and/or historical value.
In other words, the first four essays are about writers for whom she has deep empathy, but the remaining essays are about writers for whom certain features exist that prevent empathy. An examination and analysis of what those features are is what constitutes her quest for the rest of the book.
While the last four chapters do not bear fruit in the sense that they only depict a terminus of creative genius in these writers or relate a limited historical impact regarding them (as against a psychological or spiritual renaissance in these writers' works for the next generation), they nonethless are written in a seeming effortless breeziness that makes reading them almost as enjoyable as reading those first four stunning, penetrating, and memorable essays, essays, I forgot to add, that are totally worth the purchase price.
For example, Saul Bellow's and Philip Roth's works are examined for their mysogyny (with no mention, curiously, at all of the humor that's to be found in them). It's hard to feel empathy for mysognists.
Andre Dubus is examined for the limited and weak sentimental Catholic vision he has of the weak and limited characters he depicts. It's very difficult to feel empathic for pathetic and sentimental visionaries.
Raymond Carver is also examined for the weakness of sentimentality in his creation of weak and despairing characters.
Allen Ginsberg is examined for having attained by the end of his life the identity of an American success story despite his limitations, weaknesses, and qualifications as an outsider. I think Vivian Gornick leaves unanswered the question whether the poetry will survive.
V.S. Naipaul is examined for the weakness of coldness toward and lack of empathy for Third World peoples, and James Baldwin is praised for the weakness of anger since it allowed him to write his early great novels and nonfiction but is further analyzed in that anger because it stopped being creative once the Civil Rights Movement was underway, thus making his creative impetus a historical fascination merely.
Vivian Gornick motivates you to want to read "New Grubb Street" and "Odd Women" by George Gissing; she seduces you to want to read H.G. Wells' "Experiment in Autobiography, and she fortifies in you a deep interest to want to spend time with Loren Eisely's "All the Strange Hours" and to love and enjoy Randall Jarrell's poetry and literary criticism because all of these men have created works that still haunt and satisfy the imagination, a place where readers can find and know themselves as well, just as she has found and came to know herself better as well through reading their empathic and rich works.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
A great, thought-provoking collection, 2008-09-26
Working from the rather simple thesis that "great literature...is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort," Gornick has produced nine critical and biographical essays that dissect and at times rebuke the personal weaknesses of her twelve male subjects. In all, the book is a thought-provoking exploration of how these weaknesses informed, and were informed by, each man's struggle to become more than "the other," to come to terms with his fellow man and--more important here--with women.
Gornick has a knack for artfully distilling the psychology of entire races (or of the male species itself) into critical judgments: Jewish-American writing at its best "fashions the language anew precisely so that it can express what it feels like to be ill," emotionally, mentally, and socially; colonial-born writers like V.S. Naipaul are "sealed off" from organic society, bound to the task of "relentlessly accusing humanity of being the sum of its disabilities." Men in general are subject to the same anthropological treatment when Gornick judges them to be excessively sentimental or small-minded. For Hemingway's descendants--Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus--the sight of "men and women struggling together in dumb erotic need arouses...an astonishing capacity to respond to the desolation of ordinary lives." This response, however, is stunted by each man's refusal to see the two sexes as fighting the same existential battles. Gornick has great empathy for "the other," as she makes clear in her preface, but this empathy does not extend to writers' whose work never escapes a narrow worldview, whether it be one limited by race or by sex.
The favorite men in Gornick's life--the novelists George Gissing and H.G. Wells, essayist and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, literary critic Randall Jarrell--are praised not just for overcoming their personal weaknesses, but for groping toward an understanding of "men-and-women-together." These four are spared both the indictments and the tendency toward generalization found in the more critical essays. In these pieces--which make up the first half of the book--we are treated to fuller portraits of the writers and their flaws: Wells' devouring sexual need, Eiseley's extreme aloofness, Jarrell's obsession with aging. We learn how these flaws shaped their work and their relationships: with women, with art, with the world. Perhaps most importantly, these four men illicit a personal response from Gornick that's lacking in the rest of the book. Her enthusiasm left me itching to read Gissing's "The Odd Women" and Wells's autobiography.
"The Men in My Life" is a solid addition to Gornick's work. She clearly cares deeply about literature and believes in its ability to bridge the gaps between men and women, author and society, writer and reader. In most of these essays--especially those about men who managed to narrow these divides--her feeling is quite contagious.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Sweet Conversation, 2008-09-16
Vivian Gornick knows the personal value of reading literature, and it's great to have another book of essays on literature by her, even if the reader is left hungering for more than she actually gives of the personal perspective of Vivian Gornick herself in this particular work.
The men in her life are twelve literary figures, most of whom no longer are living but nonetheless are the subject of nine chapters (the Preface counts as Chapter 1), the longest chapter being the essay devoted to Philip Roth (living) and Saul Bellows (deceased).
The first four essays are wonderfully intimate, instructive, and stunning, devoted as they are to the psychological fascination and personal meaning inherent in the writings of such unique writers as George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Lorein Eisley, and Randall Jarrell. Through these essays we come to value them as Outsiders who are capable of revealing their inner lives truthfully and courageously and thus inspiringly to future readers.
The reader anticipates that the rest of the book will carry these same kinds of psychological and personal-value excavations with the remaining writers as with the first four, but the reader will be disappointed for this (unwarranted) anticipation.
The remaining five essays embrace rather a public and impersonal viewpoint, not an intimate one, thus valuing the sociological, academic, and historical perspectives for writers Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, already mentioned, Allen Ginsberg, Rayond Carver, Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, and finally (Chapter 9) James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul.
Whereas Vivian Gornick seems personally driven by her own sense of being an Outsider to find the special weaknesses (like her own) in literary men whose written lives she finds personally fecundating, creative, and endlessly enriching (namely the first four men in her book, especially George Gissing), the last eight men in her life -- and for this book -- seem to have been chosen for examinations and analyses of male weaknesses that are terminal and whose writings are suspect for their mere temporalness, limitedness, and/or historical value.
In other words, the four four essays are about writers for whom she has deep empathy, but the remaining essays are about writers for whom certain features exist that prevent empathy. An examination and analysis of what those features are is what constitutes her quest for the rest of the book.
While the last four chapters do not bear fruit in the sense that they only depict a terminus of creative genius in these writers or relate a limited historical impact regarding them (as against a psychological or spiritual renaissance in these writers' works for the next generation), they nonethless are written in a seeming effortless breeziness that makes reading them almost as enjoyable as reading those first four stunning, penetrating, and memorable essays, essays, I forgot to add, that are totally worth the purchase price.
For example, Saul Bellow's and Philip Roth's works are examined for their mysogyny (with no mention, curiously, at all of the humor that's to be found in them). It's hard to feel empathy for mysognists.
Andre Dubus is examined for the limited and weak sentimental Catholic vision he has of the weak and limited characters he depicts. It's very difficult to feel empathic for pathetic and sentimental visionaries.
Raymond Carver is also examined for the weakness of sentimentality in his creation of weak and despairing characters.
Allen Ginsberg is examined for having attained by the end of his life the identity of an American success story despite his limitations, weaknesses, and qualifications as an outsider. I think Vivian Gornick leaves unanswered the question whether the poetry will survive.
V.S. Naipaul is examined for the weakness of coldness toward and lack of empathy for Third World peoples, and James Baldwin is praised for the weakness of anger since it allowed him to write his early great novels and nonfiction but is further analyzed in that anger because it stopped being creative once the Civil Rights Movement was underway, thus making his creative impetus a historical fascination merely.
Vivian Gornick motivates you to want to read "New Grubb Street" and "Odd Women" by George Gissing; she seduces you to want to read H.G. Wells' "Experiment in Autobiography, and she fortifies in you a deep interest to want to spend time with Loren Eisely's "All the Strange Hours" and to love and enjoy Randall Jarrell's poetry and literary criticism because all of these men have created works that still haunt and satisfy the imagination, a place where readers can find and know themselves as well, just as she has found and came to know herself better as well through reading their empathic and rich works.
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