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.”
