At times, The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick's collection of reflections on her decades of life as a New Yorker, feels impersonal for a book subtitled "A Memoir." However, memoir is not necessarily synonymous with autobiography, and instead, the essayist and former Village Voice reporter is more interested in impressions, opinions and vividly drawn vignettes of urban life than in assembling facts and dates in chronological order.
The Odd Woman and the City is strewn with scenes of everyday New York City--on the street, in the subway, in coffee shops and grocery stores--in which Gornick (Fierce Attachments) is both participant and observer. Many of her anecdotes have a particular feel: encounters with friends and contemporaries are shaded with an awareness that the city where they grew up and came of age is now the city where they are getting old. Bits of the ongoing, 20-year-long conversation she's had with her friend Leonard are woven through the book, frequently leading into or out of longer discourses on literature, history or city culture.
In one of those literary discussions, Gornick describes a novel as "all voice, and very little plot." It's not meant to be disparaging, and the same summation might be applied to The Odd Woman and the City. A compelling voice can keep a reader engaged even when the narrative wobbles; Gornick doesn't really attempt to build a narrative here, but she certainly has the voice. Moving easily between the intimate and the grand scale, this is memoir as conversation--an intelligent, rambling, provocative conversation accompanying a long walk across New York City. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness