The Men in My Life
by Vivian Gornick
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Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large show more theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort.Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that "ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright." Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: "Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop." Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers--talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men--who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known--she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature. show lessTags
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Whether or not one agrees with her observations on literature I cannot imagine anyone not acknowledging Gornick's brilliance She has written some of my favorite pieces of cultural criticism (though our politics differ wildly.) Gornich is stunningly well-read and has the ability to see what literature says about America. This collection is brilliant. My personal favorite essays are the one on Saul Bellow and Philip Roth (anyone who struggles with the misogyny of these extraordinary writers will want to read this) and the essay on Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. With respect to many of the male authors covered here Gornick does a great job of burrowing into their perceptions of and reflections on women and what it says about show more them and about their historical moment. This is a brief volume that I tucked in and out of over a series of months and I wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone who loves literature, especially 20th century literature. show less
No, it's not a romantic novel. Gornick writes about male authors who have meaning for her, some she re-reads annually. The essays on H.G.Wells, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and V.S. Naipal are particularly insightful.
i'm not very interested in male authors but i enjoyed this book.
It's now available as an ebook on the MIT press portal http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/product/men-in-my-life
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Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments and The Odd Woman and the City and the classic text on writing The Situation and the Story.
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- The Men in My Life
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