New York Nostalgia: City of Girls

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Bloomsbury

Pp. 466

This novel of New York and nostalgia is written in the framework of a letter. When Angela writes to Vivian asking, “Given that my mother has passed away, I wonder if you might now feel comfortable telling me what you were to my father?” Vivian decides to respond with the story of her life and, although we don’t actually know who Angela or her father is, and it’s quite some way through the book before we discover that, the format leads to a conversational style as Vivian talks to Angela without trying to upset or offend her.

Vivian grows up in a typical conservative WASP family in upstate New York, where there is an assumption that she will go to college, find a husband and settle down into the life of a wife and mother. Due to reasons of lethargy and lack of engagement, her parents pack her off to New York to stay with her Aunt Peg, who happens to run a rather dilapidated playhouse. Vivian has always been told that she hasn’t got a lot of talent, but she can sew, and she is soon making costumes for all the productions and winning friends with her skill with a needle and a tight budget.

When Vivian reaches New York and meets the showgirls, she is wildly distracted by their gossip and their glamour, and entranced by their lifestyle, which is different from anything she has ever known. The leader of this troop is the outrageously entitled personification of a whirlwind, Celia Ray. Her behaviour is infuriating and inconsiderate, but Vivian is happy to tolerate it because it makes her feel included into another world of conviction, enthusiasm and, above all, youth.

The novel is a love story to a time and a place. The time was the 1940s; the place was New York City, more specifically, the Lily Playhouse. Sure, there was a war approaching, but with the callow and shallow nature of self-obsessed youth, Vivian managed to disregard it, even though her brother had just joined the navy. New York is a city of dreams, possibilities and action, and in Vivian’s eyes and breathless descriptions, the Lily Playhouse is where these dramas take shape. It would be a fabulous, chaotic place to work, but the business model is unsustainable, and it is the sort of atmosphere that can be regarded fondly with hindsight, but not last forever or be recreated. Elizabeth Gilbert, through Vivian’s reminisces, is expert at blending the brilliance with the base, and tempering the glow of nostalgia with the grit of reality.

A theatre is the perfect metaphor for presenting a bright surface to conceal a shabby behind, and the shows that were staged at the Lily are the essence of this. “To my mind there was never anything better than those simple, enthusiastic revues. They made me happy. They were designed to make people happy without making the audience work too hard to understand what was going on.”

Vivian spends a lot of her youth being told who she is, and what she should be, by men. She discovers another talent – that of making men desire her – and she works that angle for all it is worth, and far beyond, damaging her own and others’ relationships in the process. There is a freedom of sex which she interprets as power; it is not as if she enjoys the act itself, but she does relish the game. She is callous and flippant and frivolous, and she loves every second of it, until she becomes entangled in a scandal and is judged, again unfairly, for her part in the affair – men get away with indiscretions; women are discreetly got away. In typical Moll Flanders style, the later bits of her life, when she comes to realisations and profundities are not as interesting as the titillating sections of her wild youth.

City of Girls is mainly fun and frivolous. It has some dark moments hiding in the shadows, waiting for the bright lights of the big city or the playhouse to fade to leave behind the reality of life. It is a paean to concealment; through theatre, fashion and sex, but it is not superficial. It is one person’s account, but it is also a universal truth. After all, as someone who knew a bit about theatre once wrote, “All the world’s a stage.”