Elizabeth Gilbert became a bona fide celebrity after the astounding success of Eat Pray Love (2006), which sold over 12 million copies. And the ensuing developments in her life — including a failed marriage with the man she fell in love with at the end of Eat Pray Love, a new relationship with her best friend, and then her death from cancer — have only served to cement her spot in the public imagination. She shares every life event with her millions of social media followers and is written about worldwide.
As a result, it is often easy to be blinded by her star status and forget that she is, in fact, a rather fine novelist. Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things was a historical novel about a trail-blazing young woman navigating the world of 19th-century botany, but it was also about giving a voice to female desire at a time when ‘respectable’ girls did not possess the language for it. Now, in City of Girls, Gilbert places that desire at the centre of the stage — literally and figuratively. Vivian Morris — a young costume designer who has broken free of the world of her rich, conservative family to go to New York in search of adventure — is caught on camera kissing a showgirl. This causes a huge tabloid scandal in 1940s New York, and Vivian, who is also the narrator, sees it as a life-changing experience, for it is the first time she is brought face to face with shame and debilitating regret: “I hadn’t tended to my life very carefully thus far... but I still cared enough about it that I didn’t want it ruined.”
Painful disjunctures are Gilbert’s specialty, both in her books and in her ideas about going through life. City of Girls is another meditation on that theme, but it reflects more of its writer’s own intrepidity than is expected in a novel set in the 1940s. Even though the backdrop is the Manhattan theatre community at the time of World War II, Vivian’s disaster, which includes the loss of her job, is distinctly modern.
Gilbert had recently explained that the need to write this book stemmed from a feeling that “there was something missing in the Western canon of literature, a story about women with really active sex lives whose lives are not destroyed by it”. However, in a bid to fulfil her mission to allow Vivian to live out her desires without far-reaching repercussions, Gilbert loses sight of the fact that sex is often closely linked to other aspects of our selves — our confidence, disillusionment with our careers, our friendships and our relationship with the world at large. Vivian does not really seem to be taken with her life: she merely exists, meets men and showgirls, has sex and carries on.
However, in spite of all these lovers, City of Girls revolves around female friendships, exploring their richness and drawbacks with remarkable sensitivity. The most beguiling aspect of Vivian’s character is the manner in which she deeply admires other women. She speaks of them with delight and reverence: the glamorous showgirl, Celia, the artsy Aunt Peg, the secretary, Olive, who keeps the theatre afloat.
But it is Edna, the stage actress with an enviable ‘menswear’ wardrobe, who has the greatest impact on Vivian’s life. And Gilbert makes the reader feel all of Vivian’s regret and mortification when she loses Edna’s respect. Her vibrant authorial voice shines through, making City of Girls a bewitching story about a woman and her female friends balancing their desires with the age in which they live.
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert, Bloomsbury, Rs 599
