Cities of Girls

Did you ever read a book by mistake? I've done this more than once. Two years ago, I reread Bergdorf Blondes, which was apparently so unmemorable the first time that I did not actually remember having read it previously, except when I noticed that the ending seemed very familiar and wondered how the author had gotten away with such an obvious plagiarism, but then I realized that I had actually just read the same stupid book again. 

This time, what I did was to read the wrong author altogether. Someone on the Twitter posted something about an Elizabeth McCracken novel, which got me thinking about how I'd never read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work, and I decided to remedy that right away. And I got a digital copy of City of Girls and was about 25 pages in before I realized that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote City of Girls. And I still haven't read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work. 

I’m not sure how I mixed up McCracken and Gilbert, which are not really similar at all. UNLESS of course, the Twitter person tweeted that McCracken and not Gilbert wrote City of Girls and I searched for it only by title and didn’t realize until later that I had the wrong Elizabeth. That’s probably it. That’s totally it. 

I’ll do anything to avoid actually writing about something, won’t I? Ridiculous. 

Anyway, I’m finished with City of Girls now. That title is reminiscent of late 90s/early aughts chick lit (much like Bergdorf Blondes, which is also all about NYC girls), am I right? Like a pink book jacket illustrated with a mid-century-looking fashion advertisement drawing, and the title in an elegant (or playful) black script. I expected a book about a girl working at a fashion magazine, oppressed by a haughty and dictatorial boss, who spends her scarce free time drinking too much with her hilarious but heedless best friend, maxing out her credit cards, and scheming out a plan to get her rich and handsome scoundrel of a boyfriend to marry her. Spoiler: He does not marry her, but she realizes that she’s better off without him. She leaves her terrible job for a much better job, gets her life and her finances in order, and goes on to achieve great professional and personal success, while the former boyfriend leads a stultifying suburban life with the beautiful but dull woman whom he married instead of our heroine. If you are not familiar with the genre, I just abstracted a novel that incorporates every chick lit story line into one paragraph. That was a tour de force, don’t you think? 

Anyway, City of Girls was pretty good; rather, it’s not bad. It’s all told in the second person, meaning a first-person narrator tells her story to another person, not directly to the reader. In this case, the other person is the daughter of a man whom she (the daughter) suspects had an affair with the narrator. No spoilers, but the narrator has to tell the daughter her whole life story in order to make sense of the supposed affair. 

The protagonist and narrator, Vivian Morris, is an early 20th century archetype; an upper-class wild girl who rebels against her wealthy family and their bourgeois plans for her life. She fails out of Vassar and is banished to New York City to live with her bohemian aunt. In New York, Vivian lives a predictably wild and colorful life and then a less-predictable, still-unconventional but much more quiet and peaceful life. Both Vivian and the man whose daughter hears her story, make youthful mistakes that haunt them for many years after, but Vivian moves on and makes the best of her life, while the man, a WW 2 veteran, is paralyzed by guilt complicated by his physical and psychological battle scars. The story’s ending is neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. But it doesn’t matter because the story probably isn’t the point. 

Elizabeth Gilbert famously wrote Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t think I ever read it. No disrespect, it’s just not my kind of thing. Maybe I should read it because Gilbert is quite a good writer but maybe just not a novelist. City of Girls, it seems, is less a novel than a sort of poetic and beautifully written commentary on the prisons we build for ourselves, and how some of us escape those prisons early, some escape later, and some sad souls never escape at all. Really, this is why I think the book is only not bad. I liked it but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. When I read a novel, I like to be all in, and I wasn’t all in on this one,  and I think I know why. I think that Gilbert was more interested in the message than the story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad novel; it’s just that it could have been much better if the story and the characters led, and the ideas followed. 

I thought about getting out of the early to mid-20th century and back to the present day, but then Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels came up in my queue, and I’m right back where I always am, in the immediate pre-war 20th century, when the whole world was about to fall apart and only a few people seemed to really know what was about to happen. I feel like one of those people right now, and I wish I didn’t.