Review by New York Times Review
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER offers an intercession for "our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone." We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, "the essential unknowability of others" means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don't we talk about it more openly? "What's so shameful," she asks, about "having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?" This daring and seductive book - ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known - raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an "uneasy combination of separation and exposure." "The Lonely City," like Laing's previous books - "The Trip to Echo Spring," about famous alcoholic writers, and "To the River," about the Ouse, where Virginia Woolf drowned herself - takes an idiosyncratic approach, merging memoir, philosophy, travelogue and biography. This time she discusses an array of cultural figures, including the singer Klaus Nomi, the Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris, the manifesto writer and Warhol shooter Valerie Solanas, and the installation artist Zoe Leonard, ultimately focusing on Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger and David Wojnarowicz. Tripping lightly from sociology to cultural criticism to personal anecdote, Laing explores how each of these characters might help her out of her despair, while also considering the possibility that loneliness might transport her into "an otherwise unreachable experience of reality." Recently heartbroken, Laing - approaching her mid-30s, "an age at which female alonen ess . . . carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure" - takes up residence in a series of vacant apartments in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side. "What does it feel like to be lonely?" Laing asks. "It feels like being hungry." And it looks like this: the author wandering the streets alone on Halloween, turning pages in silent archives, crying because she can't get a set of blinds to close, sprawling on a sublet couch mesmerized by her computer screen. In her public isolation, she resembles, she says, the woman in Hopper's "Automat." The artist David Wojnarowicz's work, Laing writes, "did more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone." Reading his diaries, she has the sensation of "coming up for air after being a long time under water." Laing identifies some commonalities between their two childhoods - "people leaving, people drinking too much, people losing control." But as an adult, her experience of New York does not mimic his. Where he cruised the West Side piers, she cruises Craigslist, finding her encounters there far more anthropological than erotic. Laing describes the libidinous 1970s outdoor-sex scene not only without judgment, but even with envy, seeing it as a "utopian, anarchic, sexy version of what the city itself offers." She wonders if this era of anonymous hookups provided an effective strategy for managing urban loneliness, creating "the kind of weak ties that sociologists believe glue metropolises together," though she admits Jane Jacobs's followers probably meant regular orders from deli guys rather than sexual favors from strangers. Inspired by the bravery of the artists she studies, Laing chronicles her own brutal internal monologues and says she feels the growth of loneliness like "mold or fur." She notes that the American promise of sameness - elusive for a child of Slavic immigrants like Warhol or a Brit like her - can appear "a profoundly desirable state." Slyly confessional moments, as when Laing bemoans the challenge of looking "unconcerned, or worse, appealing," make one root for her as for a romcom heroine, only her affair is with New York and her work rather than with a leading man. In this way, the whole book can be read as a hyperliterate breakup memoir. There are far worse ways to go on the rebound, it turns out, than to get lost in art and a new city. Recent years have seen a flowering of subversive feminist writing on desire. Laing recalls other personal-political mavericks like Rebecca Solnit and Maggie Nelson. There should be a name for this new crop of women evading standard formats and binaries like serious-or-popular, girly-or-macho, ambitious-or-accessible. Maybe, given their enthusiastic deployment of oblique approaches to Big Ideas, they could be called the Ellipticals. Their confident embrace of a middle ground feels revolutionary. Laing's in-betweenness extends to her sexual identity. She finds the "gender box" to be too small, saying she always felt "more like a boy, a gay boy . . . somewhere between the binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both." Laing makes a Scooby-Doo reference as effortlessly as she examines D.W. Winnicott's theory of transitional objects and Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations." Speaking of, there is an irony to her discourse on language's failures, when her own - she luxuriates in words: "gneiss," "spivvy," "carapace" - is so fluid and playful. In one exceptionally beautiful section, Laing catalogs the contradictory cravings that draw people (including her) to social media. She talks about feeling like "a spy, carrying out perpetual surveillance," and encountering "images that generated emotion, overlapping the pointless, the appalling and the desirable." Who wouldn't want to exist online? "You can reach out or you can hide; you can lurk and you can reveal yourself, curated and refined." And yet, she sees the screen as simultaneously magnifying suffering. It took only "a few missed connections or lack of likes for the loneliness to resurface, to be flooded with the bleak sense of having failed to make contact." RARELY, LAING VEERS into polemicism, as when, leaning heavily on Sarah Schulman and Susan Sontag, she writes with an atypical lack of hum or that "everything becomes steadily more homogenized, more intolerant of difference." Really? "Everything"? When gay marriage has become legal, transgender issues are at the fore and young people today are, if anything, obsessed with defending difference? She also says Manhattan is becoming "a kind of gated island for the superrich" - an assertion belied by her own "cheap sublets" and her magical walks along (as of press time) still toll-free sidewalks. The stridency of her critique of the "glossiness of late capitalism" feels out of step with the rest of the book's subtle analysis - for example, of how society routinely fails the loneliest among us, as happened during the AIDS crisis. Reading this book on a lonesome business trip, I found myself wondering if "The Lonely City" made the exact wrong or exact right companion for forlorn airport loitering and desolate continental breakfasting. I think both. Reading this book made me feel aloneness more acutely, but also exposed its value. As Laing describes finding consolation in the work of artists, so this book serves as both provocation and comfort, a secular prayer for those who are alone - meaning all of us. ADA CALHOUN is the author of "St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Writer and critic Laing searches for answers to the puzzles of her life in the experiences and creative endeavors of others. In The Trip to Echo Spring (2014), she explores the impact alcoholism has had on various American writers. In her newest imaginative and poignant quest, shaped by her gift for entwining memoir with incisive biographical inquiries and astute interpretations, she looks to visual art for illumination of the true nature of loneliness. Her attempt to chart the complex relationship between loneliness and art, she explains, was catalyzed by a dark spell of alienation that seized her while she was living in wretched New York City sublets and bingeing on Internet videos and social media. Seeking an antidote, she immersed herself in Edward Hopper's life and paintings, responding most profoundly to his distinct perspective on urban life and the strange phenomenon of feeling hopelessly alone while surrounded by strangers. With loneliness as her lens, Laing discerns radical strategies of anxiety and consolation in Andy Warhol, from his persona as a living caricature to his worship of pop culture and reliance on the mediation of telephones, cameras, and tape recorders. As Laing chronicles the goings-on at Warhol's infamous Factory, she considers the paradox of both longing for acceptance and needing distance. The standoff between insiders and outsiders informs her sensitive telling of the tragic tale of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol. Laing brings the same sympathetic receptivity to her profile of the self-taught Chicago artist Henry Darger, detecting compassion for abused and misfit children in his famously disturbing, violent, otherworldly illustrated epic. The artist who resonates the most for Laing is David Wojnarowicz, who survived a brutal boyhood and battering life on the streets before he began addressing issues of connection and aloneness in bold and unsparing photographs, films, drawings, and writings, which he hoped would help make somebody feel less alienated. Following Wojnarowicz's trail to the carnival of gay sex and rogue art on New York's abandoned piers in the 1970s and 1980s, Laing writes of her own transient years and wrestling with gender categories as a daughter raised by lesbians who felt that if she was anything, it was a gay boy. Ultimately, Wojnaraowicz delivers Laing to the 1980s AIDS epidemic, a hellish engine for loneliness that turned him into a grieving activist and then took his life. Laing perceives that loneliness is not only a sense of isolation but also of brokenness, and that art can be an annealing force. And like the artists she profiles, she refuses to look away from pain or simplify trauma, or deny anyone respect or dignity. Through her ardent research, empathetic response, original thought, courageous candor, and exquisite language, Laing joins the ever-growing pool of writers among them Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hope Jahren, Jhumpa Lahiri, Leslie Jamison, Helen Macdonald, Sally Mann, Patti Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Edmund de Waal, and Terry Tempest Williams who are transforming memoir into a daring and dynamic literary form of discovery that laces the stories of individuals into the continuum of humanity and the larger web of life on Earth to provocative and transforming effect.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The lonely city of the title is teeming with painters, filmmakers, writers, and thinkers. In her new book, Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring) creates a "map of loneliness," tracking its often-paradoxical contours in her own life as a transplant to New York City and traces how loneliness can inspire creativity. The central figures of the book-Henry Darger, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz-were all "hyper-alert to the gulfs between people, to how it can feel to be islanded amid a crowd." By focusing on four artists (others, like Billie Holiday, also make appearances), Laing's writing becomes expansive, exploring their biographies, sharing art analysis, and weaving in observations from periods of desolation that was at times "cold as ice and clear as glass." She invents new ways to consider how isolation plays into art or even the Internet (which turns her into an obsessed teenager, albeit one who calls the screen her "cathected silver lover"). For once, loneliness becomes a place worth lingering. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
