To say that I spent lockdown mostly re-reading would be an appealing lie. As much as I indulged the fantasy of using quarantine to re-acquaint myself with classic novels, most of them stood mutely by my bed, functioning as makeshift coffee coasters as I panic-scrolled through social media, or devoured other people’s “pandemic journals.” Though the latter came to blur into one, sourdough-flavoured unit, reading them seemed preferable to reaching back to Camus, Flaubert, or Defoe. The present moment offered more than enough stimulation. Escaping into other timeframes held not only the appearance of indulgence but demanded an internal ice-sculpture of discipline I did not possess.
In such a context, the American writer Vivian Gornick’s essay collection Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, published in more innocent times (February) could register as a relic of the old, undistanced world. In taut, agile essays which braid anecdotal yarns around steady, multi-angled excavations of writers like DH Lawrence, Marguerite Duras, and Colette, the book builds a case for re-visiting one’s own personal canon and seeing what was either skipped the first time round or negligently missed. Valorising effort, labour, and the “life-long project to see oneself primarily as a working person,” Gornick positions re-reading not as a regression into nostalgia or narcotic reassurance, but a form of active confrontation with our prior reading, thinking, multiple and estranged selves.
Gornick is best known for shaking up the staid conventions of the memoir genre. In her breakout works of autobiographical criticism Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Odd Woman and the City (2015), she scours her origin stories—particularly the ongoing and ambivalent terrain of her relationship with her mother—with a lack of sentimentalism that is both invigorating and occasionally bruising. Recently, she has enjoyed even more of a revival with the re-print of her 1977 book, The Romance of American Communism, which combines a probing sociological account of communism’s brief flare in America with a rigorously honest look at the author’s upbringing in a communist Jewish household in the Bronx. Though the work is burnished by such interludes, it is never self-aggrandizing. Instead, Gornick uses the example of her family history as a template to intimately interview ex-Party members from a range of backgrounds, humanizing what was typecast as an ‘alien,’ demonic movement in the United States.
An enduring love affair with the political left is once again evoked in Unfinished Business, which Gornick opens by describing her engaged, “noisy” childhood home, where “Karl Marx and the international working class were articles of faith.” It is strongly suggested that the stamina developed by this education laid the groundwork for a lifetime of “relentless inner concentration” and investigating past assumptions; teaching her to “read to feel the power of Life with a capital L.” Yet to live life in bold capitals, the book suggests, demands nuanced understandings of “the relation between the individual and ideology” or the wider societal contexts which dictate how in great literature, protagonists are shaped by “external forces out of their control.”
If such talk of “ideology” and “forces” skirts close to the jargon of a literary theory seminar, elsewhere Gornick’s vulnerability and candour dials back the patois. In interviews she often brands her distinctive blend of criticism and recursive memoir a kind of "personal journalism," and Unfinished Business for the most part traffics in a similar proximity, and immediacy, of tone. In a chapter dedicated to re-reading Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence’s “staccato” prose is memorably echoed by a visceral account of Gornick’s first marriage. The book is so evocative that it brings her back to the fraught morning of the wedding day itself, where, en route to the church, she was almost hit by a truck “because, as I crossed the street, I was still saying yes, no, yes, no to myself, and failed to stop walking when the light turned red.”
For Gornick, re-reading isn’t just a portal to consolidation (though she shows how sometimes it can be a form of re-articulating and affirming sets of thoughts about a subject over time) but exposes the emotional distortions that accrue through repetition. After she re-reads Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, which she understands as an exemplary work of “self-estrangement,” a memory of her mother cutting up a dress that she couldn’t wait to wear before a childhood party is unsettled, and the writer investigates if she may indeed have misremembered the event. Quoting from Duras’s project to overturn and obsessively revisit “certain facts, feelings, events that I buried,” Gornick ventures that the relationship of age to truth is not necessarily proportional: “So old and still with so little information,” she rues.
The inclusion of Duras feels significant not only for its undermining of the classic novel’s rigid structure (upheld somewhat in readings of Elizabeth Bowen and Colette) but for how much The Lover itself integrates re-reading as a plot point. A similar technique infuses the writer Lydia Davis’s 1994 work The End of the Story (incidentally the only novel that my bombed attention-span entertained in full lockdown) which, like The Lover, frames a woman obsessively recounting the disintegration of a love affair whilst interrogating and re-reading the assumptions of the narrator (who may or may not be Lydia Davis) putting it in writing in “real” time. On publication, both Davis and Duras’s works were predictably accused of narcissism and self-interest; misogynistically aligned with “feminine” propensities towards excessive rumination. Countering such narrow judgments, in Unfinished Business, Gornick cultivates re-reading less as feminine pathology than as strong feminist strategy against self-erasure and self-censorship, however. For Gornick, to re-read is to acknowledge that there is always more that can be said and discovered, especially where trauma has splintered events or formed roadblocks in the psyche that require time to dismantle. Perhaps recently I reached, and keep reaching, for Davis because she is so astute on how difficult it is to lend words to the pain—or pleasure—of a thing while you’re in the thick of living it.
In an interview conducted last autumn, the artist Kiki Smith, responding to a question about treading old ground in her work, or obsessively re-visiting prior rehearsed material, suggests there can be beauty in circling the same, entrenched garden path over and over again. She proposes that perhaps after years of worrying the same fault-lines, “something new” might emerge; a metaphor that those lucky enough to have had access to some outside space over these past months might find resonant or chafing. In Unfinished Business, Vivian Gornick stops short of ascribing “newness” or transcendence to the hard work of re-reading. Through her sharp, forever re-adjusting lens, re-reading isn’t an escape from life but an intensification of it. And though at time of present writing few of us might yearn for more “intensity,” there is something that feels radical about letting further truths take shape in the white space beneath paragraphs; about pausing the ballooning cycles of hot takes and loitering in already-trod ground.
