Leave it to Vivian Gornick to write a short book that is the opposite of a quick read. A longstanding practitioner of what she calls "personal journalism," Gornick seeds the 10 critical essays in Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader with vignettes from her life, giving each think piece the soul of memoir.
Gornick, the author of a dozen previous works of nonfiction, including the canonical memoir Fierce Attachments and the starkly gorgeous hybrid The Odd Woman and the City, has lived long enough to return--and in some cases re-return--to books that she hasn't touched in decades. She can now see them "in the light of insight only years of living could have supplied." What a revelation it was for her to go back to D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers after having been married; to go back to Colette after having had sexual adventures of her own; and, especially, to go back to any of a number of books after having become a feminist--"the exhilaration I experienced once I had the analysis!"
Whenever we return to a book, Gornick suggests, we revisit ourselves (particularly when we've left marginalia behind), but we also tend to our relationship with it. "When I read Jude [the Obscure] again, most recently," she writes, "I wondered, as I turned the last page, if the book had finally finished saying what it had to say to me." Unfinished Business is an enchanting work worth taking in--and perhaps taking in again. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer