A Woman in New York City: a portrait in four books

I have never been to New York. But I love the idea of that relentless city; that beacon for those who hunger for something greater, who yearn to be at the centre of the world. A yearning perfectly summed up by chef Danny Bowien: "New York is electric. All things are within reach, and you can feel ten million people reaching out for something at once."

During the past three months, I found myself reading a series of four books that centred around a lone woman navigating life in New York City. Journeying with these four women through its streets was a celebration of the unique individuality and rich inner life that can only be forged through that uniquely solitary battle for oneself in a big, indifferent city.

The variety within this small category - woman v. city - attests to the glorious proliferation of stories that wound their way through the city. The tales of how these four woman, fictitious and real, carved their own way are like tonic. Each affirms a defiant spirit, the freedom enjoyed when one insists on only answering to oneself; to make life uniquely one's own. From crashing Gatsby-esque parties in the '30s to to flirting with overdose with a young train-wreck in the year 2000, reading these in sequence creates a pulsing and multi-faceted portrait of the city you can escape into.

Rules of Civility (2011)

In 10 words: An adventure through Gatsby's world with kickass female protagonist.

It's New Year's Eve, 1937. Twenty-five year old Katey Kontent* and her friend Eve meet a solitary and mysterious gentleman, Tinker, at a jazz bar. By the end of the night, they are tipsy with illicit champagne and belting the refrains of Auld Lang Syne into the new year. With Tinker between them, they celebrate being young and reckless in New York city.

We are thus pulled into a love triangle that never sours into pettiness. Instead, over chapters spread over the following twelve months, we delve into a pitch perfect rendition of New York in the 30's with the fearless and scrappy Katey (think a less coquettish Holly Golightly in Gatsby's world). Each chapter is a carefully wrapped portrait strung with intrigue. It's this precision, this sometimes painfully self-aware^ staging out of the narrative, that keeps us engaged. Through each twist of story, Towles' controlled writing creates a polished and sophisticated account of being a young and ambitious woman in a city ripe with opportunity.

Katey's romp through the city takes us into both the glamour of its high society and the dregs of its destitute docks. It weaves through the numbing routine of a secretarial existence to the highs of crashing parties swirling with champagne and fireworks; from the politics of dinner party conversation, to the ready-made lunches of Automats. Underneath the trappings of the story, Katey's place as an outsider to a glittering world of connections and ease keeps the intersection of wealth and destitution at the novel's core.

Tattered copies of Walden and Washington's 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation weave their way through the narrative: Walden teasing the issue of where the essentials of life are found in a world choked with decadence while the presence of the latter questions the validity of the rules that demand a certain code of conduct deemed essential to 'civility'. The novel ultimately asks whether a veneer of civility can still exist when what lies underneath is corrupt.

Towles does all this without sacrificing the essential fun and spontaneity of Katey's adventure through her decisive twenty-sixth year. I emerged from Katey's world with that rare feeling of loss that threatens ennui when you've reached the end of a rollickingly good read.

I bought Rules of Civility a week after a silver haired, bespectacled man came up to the till one afternoon and offered me his hand. "Hi," he firmly shakes my hand, he respectfully holds my gaze, "I'm Amor. Lovely to meet you." He pauses for my name. I had never given a stranger my name at work. Behind the till, I'm not someone whose name should be known, someone whom it is lovely to meet. I scan the books, I wish you a good day. It's rarely goes beyond that superficiality. But here was Mr Towles: well-mannered, straight-forward, without pretension. A colleague praises Rules of Civility, "I was convinced the entire time I was reading a woman's writing." He chuckled self-effacingly,"Well...I guess that's the funny thing about all this, isn't it?." He gestured to the shelves and the tables. It seems to me that only a gentleman with such a generous sensibility, who very much abides the rules of civility could have written a novel named after them.

*a punny name for a protagonist who is anything but.

^ One eventful chapter is unabashedly entitled Deus Ex Machina; the chapter centred around the month of April, flippantly The Cruellest Month.

Lilian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017)

In 10 words: A night-time stroll through NYC folded with stories from '30s.

Here again, we open on New Year's Eve in New York City. The year is about to turn 1985. We are in the company of a sassy 85 year old Ms Boxfish who is about to spend the holiday just how she likes it: alone with the city. So begins a long stroll through the darkened, empty streets of NYC, interspersed with her reminiscences on a trail-blazing and unapologetic life as the highest paid advertising executive for Macy's during the Great Depression.

Based on the real life of Margaret Fishback, Rooney^ blends an extraordinary life with the joys of walking aimlessly through a city, or as the French call it flâner: to stroll, to lounge about, to let the streets absorb you. Dipping in and out of one continuous meander across the city, from Delmonico's to Central Park, from Macy's, to the abandoned warehouses by the docks, Ms Boxfish pulls us in with a force of voice and intention that immediately establishes that, though she is old, she is definitely not frail. And god forbid she be boring. We slip out into the folds of the city, not quite knowing what we're in for: surely the city at night is too rough a place for an 85 year old. But it's this vulnerability, mitigated by Ms Boxfish's savviness, which makes the night's unpredictable unfolding electrifying. The novel is charged with the bated expectation of New Year's Eve. We feel we are being invited to do something naughty, to invade the empty streets of New York armed with nothing more than a mink coat, an acerbic sense of humour, and a lifetime of memories.

I ended 2019 in the company of Ms Boxfish. As my neighbours erupted in cheers welcoming the new decade, I followed her home and into 1985, still continuing the grand adventure of her life. Having reminisced on a life fully lived, seeing how the lows blended with the highs to create the fullness of a life, I felt better equipped to face the future sum of my years. It was the perfect way to venture into a new year.

^Kathleen, who is unfortunately currently overshadowed by the trending and remarkable Sally Rooney

Fierce Attachments (1987)

In 10 words: Sharp feminist memoir about womanhood, family, love, and writing oneself.

A memoir about a childhood in the Russian Jewish tenements of the '40s, focusing on her fraught relationship with her mother and a feminist awakening in the '60s, Vivian Gornick's writing is incisive and powerful - it cleaves open a whirlwind of aches, yearnings and contradictions at the heart of life's strongest attachment - that of a daughter on her mother.

We are introduced to a world where neighbouring homes spill into each other, where the lines between family and neighbours and blurred. A world where a woman's worth is intrinsically tied to a man. It's claustrophobic, these overlapping lives. And at it's core is Gornick's ultimate source of suffocation: her mother. After her father's death, Gornick paints an image of her distraught mother as a self-pitying husk who wallows in her loss, glorifies it, and refuses to extricate her life from her husband's; who plays the role of a grieving widow until it becomes her identity. It's from this absolute absorption of a wife into her husband from which Gornick struggles to cleave herself.

She tells of her years grappling with men and sex, the boundaries between herself and the world in the shadow of this defining source of friction in her life. Not unlike, Lilian Boxfish, Gornick's memoir is also threaded through with walks in the city in later life with her now ailing mother. There are clipped conversations, bursts of righteous anger that are unable to bridge the chasm of understanding rent between them. Gornick writes with a regretful resentment interspersed with flickers of tenderness.

It's also a memoir about Gornick as writer. She writes of the physical space within her from which her writing emanates, the beauty and struggle of finding one's voice. Here, too, is an independent woman who has carved her own way in New York City. Her defiant struggle to live life and write on her own terms shine from these pages.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

In 10 words: Beautiful rich bitch takes shit-ton of pills to forget.

In the year 2000, the twenty-something year old narrator of Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation is desirable, smart, rich and utterly uninterested in everything save one: her mission to knock herself out with cocktails of pills for an entire year. She can't say exactly why she's no longer interested in life. She wants to vaguely recover from her parent's recent death and longer neglect. She wants to rinse herself of the toxic relationships in which she's entangled herself.

Again in the heart of NYC, this story is anchored around a ten minute walk from her luxe apartment (paid for from her inheritance) to a corner bodega for her daily sustenance of two large coffees and a packet of animal biscuits. This is a tale of youth burned through recklessly, told through her gradual descent into oblivion. Spliced through the groggy routine of bodega coffee and shoddy counsellor consultations (where she acquires her mind-boggling amount of pills) are reflections on her past brief professional life as an art gallery assistant and a Columbia student in love with an older Wall Street fuckboy.

Moshfegh crafts razor sharp commentary about money and art. She paints sardonic and unhealthy relationships that strike true with undercurrents of that reckless abandon which stems from that special millennial brand of self-hatred. There is a best frenemy who checks in now and then, expressing performative concern by complaining about 'how skinny' the narrator's become. This, the tortured relationship with an older fuckboy Wall Street type, and phone calls with her counsellor are her only interactions with the outside world. Her angst fuelled quest for pure erasure, for the supreme escape from the demands of life extenuates the intense alienation and loneliness unique to an existence within a throbbing city, and makes a dark, steely joke of it.

Through her anti-heroine, Moshfegh has created a tragicomedy for our millennia. It plays out the common desire to bury ourselves in bed and wake up to a different reality. Or at least to wake up to some higher, better version of ourselves.