Approaching Eye Level

by Vivian Gornick

Overview

Seminal essays on loneliness, living in New York, friendship, feminism, and writing from nonfiction master Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection—with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor, and reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage.

Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things—how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538255
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	455,555
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past 50 years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.

Editorial Reviews

"It is [Gornick's] particular genius to make readers feel what they are thinking . . . Brilliant, compelling, and cohesive." —Julia Markus, Los Angeles Times

"There's more to these seven original essays than a hymn to Manhattan. There is also exploration of that most brutal and unconquerable of human sorrows, loneliness . . . Without even a flicker of self-pity, these short pieces bear rereading many times." —Publishers Weekly

"At heart this is a book not about repose but about escalating struggle—the day-to-day struggle to face down the brutality of growing loneliness, to accept the limitations of friendship and intimacy, to honor the process of becoming oneself." —Mary Hawthorne, The New York Times

From the Publisher

Apparently Gornick writes only when she has something to say (Fierce Attachments was published in 1988), with the result that readers may not be conversant with her output of honed observations and unflinching conclusions. She is a New Yorker through and through. No place else in the country, or on the globe for that matter, nurtures her need for contact, variety and pure, random amazement. "The street," she tells us, "does for me what I cannot do for myself. On the street nobody watches, everyone performs." Everyone, that is, but Gornick. She watches a man and woman arguing on Ninth Avenue near the bus station; knowing nothing of the causes or the results of the situation becomes a part of the happening: "She too has New York kinky hair. For the moment that's comradeship enough." But there's more to these seven original essays than a hymn to Manhattan. There is also exploration of that most brutal and unconquerable of human sorrows, loneliness. One can learn more about the human soul from "On Living Alone" than can be absorbed on a first encounter. "Loneliness was me cut off from myself. Loneliness was the thing nothing out there could cure." Without even a flicker of self-pity, these short pieces bear rereading many times. Author tour. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this gripping collection of personal essays, Gornick (How I Found America, LJ 7/91) delves beneath the surface of individual, community, and work. With honesty and insightfulness, she reflects on our fear of loneliness and sense of fragmentation and the survival techniques she and others employ at work and home. Gornick takes the reader with her for walks on New York City streets; onto academic campuses in New York, California, and New England; and to the Catskills, where she works. Gornick's clear writing and honest expression of her own need for personal connections, independence, and meaningful work make the reader feel like a participant-observer in all her experiences and personal encounters. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.

Library Journal

In these essays, journalist and essayist Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments, 1987) bravely faces—and, even more remarkable, clearly renders—loneliness and the ongoing search for human connection.

Gornick brings us out on the striving, bustling streets of Manhattan, where she often finds herself walking, seeking a kind of company in the anonymous crowd. We follow her, too, into stifling, backbiting university communities where she has spent time as a visiting writing teacher, and to the Catskills, where, working as a waitress, she learned brutal lessons about human nature. She meditates painfully on a brilliant woman writer, a friend of hers, now dead, who was loved, even worshiped, by many people, yet spent her life evading intimacy. Gornick also devotes an essay to living alone; rethinking a dogmatic devotion to solitude—she once wrote a polemic called "Against Marriage"—she ponders the ways in which, post-divorce, she has never really learned to live by herself. She is courageous in these pieces, both in what she will say and in what she is willing to see. Throughout, she beautifully articulates, from a feminist perspective, her struggle to work and create, and to from meaningful relationships with others. The collection's themes come together in a final essay on letter writing, in which she argues, that, though many complain that the telephone has killed the letter, both represent vital parts of life: the impulses to connect and to narrate. Gornick argues eloquently against choosing one form of expression over the other, though this essay is a little dated now that so many people, through e-mail, are charting a new course somewhere in between.

Though Gornick's standards for quality conversation are higher than most people's—hence her vulnerability to the isolation that accompanies its absence—her hunger for connection and understanding resonates and inspires. Her prose is sharp and her characterizations—of her friends, modern life, and of herself—ring true.

Kirkus Reviews