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A review by bhnmt61
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
3.0
Vivian Morris ends up in NYC after flunking out of Vassar and for a few months lives a life of excitement and abandon. She lives in a rundown old theater with her aunt and they put on shows and Vivvie parties with her new friends. Then a crisis happens and she must recover. Then she does and the years go by and then she is old.
Other than being about a hundred pages too long, this was a decent read. I guess I am disappointed because I was expecting more. I would have DNF’ed about a third of the way through out of boredom— I kept wondering why her editor didn’t scale back the pages and pages of tedious description of drunken partying — but I didn’t want to give up on it and it did get better (about the time that Uncle Billy shows up and they start working on the play, City of Girls, that gives the novel its name).
The central idea— that a woman in her nineties would write what comes to over 400 printed pages to explain her life to the daughter of one of her dearest friends, whom she has barely met— was just not believable to me. If it had been an older woman rambling on with her memories every afternoon as the younger woman comes to visit her, maybe that would have worked better, because that is exactly how it reads: a whole lot of rambling “telling” and not much “showing” (to use the language of a writing exercise).
I think I’m an anti-fan of Gilbert, by which I mean not that I am the opposite of a fan, but that I seem to have the opposite taste of most of her fans. I loved the book of hers that no one else seems to like (Committed), there’s a story of hers, “Elk Talk,” that is one of my all-time favorite short stories, but I didn’t like Eat Pray Love and found Big Magic interesting but smug and condescending. This one seemed middling at best. Maybe she’s just not for me.
Other than being about a hundred pages too long, this was a decent read. I guess I am disappointed because I was expecting more. I would have DNF’ed about a third of the way through out of boredom— I kept wondering why her editor didn’t scale back the pages and pages of tedious description of drunken partying — but I didn’t want to give up on it and it did get better (about the time that Uncle Billy shows up and they start working on the play, City of Girls, that gives the novel its name).
The central idea— that a woman in her nineties would write what comes to over 400 printed pages to explain her life to the daughter of one of her dearest friends, whom she has barely met— was just not believable to me. If it had been an older woman rambling on with her memories every afternoon as the younger woman comes to visit her, maybe that would have worked better, because that is exactly how it reads: a whole lot of rambling “telling” and not much “showing” (to use the language of a writing exercise).
I think I’m an anti-fan of Gilbert, by which I mean not that I am the opposite of a fan, but that I seem to have the opposite taste of most of her fans. I loved the book of hers that no one else seems to like (Committed), there’s a story of hers, “Elk Talk,” that is one of my all-time favorite short stories, but I didn’t like Eat Pray Love and found Big Magic interesting but smug and condescending. This one seemed middling at best. Maybe she’s just not for me.