Vivian Gornick writes insightful reviews and the ones in her new collection, Taking a Long Look, sparkle. In “Herman Melville” Gornick reviews Andrew Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work by pointing out “…a book saturated in quotations from other readers. On every other page…Lewis Mumford notes, Elizabeth Hardwick observes, Harold Bloom remarks. A rudimentary list of those quoted includes Edward Said, Walker Percy, E. M. Forster, Newton Arvin, W. H. Auden, John Updike, along with the lesser known but influential academics Frank Lentriccia, Richard Slotkin, and Dominic La Capra.” (p. 31-32)
In “Diana Trilling” Gornick focuses on the tragedy of a husband’s betrayal of his wife. No, not a sexual betrayal, but a more insidious act. “She devoted herself to cleaning up her husband’s writing and, quite early, convinced herself that without her his world would never have been fully realized. She was certain that after Lionel died and his manuscripts went public, her contribution to the famous essays would be made known to the world. But then Lionel did die, and she discovered he had destroyed all those drafts with her editing notes on them. Distraught is not the word for what she felt.” (p. 50).
In “James Salter” Gornick focuses on Salter’s erotic novel, A Sport and a Pastime, where women play very narrow roles. “Certainly it is true that most writers have only one story in them–that is, as Flannery O’Connor puts it, only one they can make come alive. Then again, it is also true that it is the writer’s obligation to make the story tell more the third or fourth time around than it did the first. For this reviewer, Salter’s work fails on that score. In his eighties, he tells the story almost exactly as he told it in his forties.” (p. 76)
Vivian Gornick ranges far and wide in her book reviews and her articles on cultural figures. If you’re looking for an intelligent series of articles full of ideas and analysis, I recommend you take a long look at Gornick’s new book. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction vii
Literature 1
1 Lore Segal 3
2 Alfred Kazin 14
3 Herman Melville 23
4 Kathleen Collins 35
5 Diana Trilling 46
6 Mary McCarthy 56
7 James Salter 70
8 Edna St. Vincent Millay 77
9 The Reading Group 84
Culture 91
10 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 93
11 Rachel Carson 100
12 Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? 110
13 Primo Levi 120
14 Hannah Arendt 131
15 Erich Fromm 140
16 The Americanization of Narcissism 151
17 The Second Sex at Fifty 160
Two New York Stories 169
18 On the Bus 171
19 Bobby’s Salon 178
Essays in Feminism 193
20 Consciousness 195
21 On Trial for Acting like a Man 225
22 The Women’s Movement in Crisis 234
23 Why Do these Men Hate Women? 245
24 Toward a Definition of the Female Sensibility 260
Acknowledgments 287
