City of Girls

Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls is a bit similar to Euphoria, in that it is historical fiction with a contemporary feel. Both offer a glimpse at a secret history, Euphoria an intimate portrait from inside a 1930s love triangle, City of Girls a record of an open-hearted girl throwing herself into the New York of 1940.

Elizabeth Gilbert got famous as the author of Eat Pray Love, and say what you will about that book, it is not the moribund account of a bygone era. I thought Gilbert’s take on historical fiction might be interesting. I must have read something else by her, though, because Eat Pray Love did not really leave me wanting more. Some shorter piece of Gilbert’s intrigued me. It may have been the Facebook post she wrote about falling in love with a woman who was dying of cancer. That was an endearingly chaotic twist ending to the love affair she’d written her bestseller about. I must have tucked away that impression, which lingered long enough to sprinkle some extra interest in whatever reviews I read about City of Girls.

I would say now, having read it, that the voice of the narrator, Vivian Morris, is both compelling in the way I thought it might be and also successfully of the time she’s describing. Vivian is explicitly addressing her account of the past to a modern audience, in the person of a young woman named Angela whose identity is initially mysterious. It occurs to me that Vivian, in her old age, is playing a role similar to the one her grandmother played for her, in being eccentric and fully alive and offering an alternate vision of womanhood. It’s as if she’s reaching into the past to highlight examples of other paths women took than just being a housewife—or a socialite who went to Vassar and was good at tennis, like her own mother. Vivian got tossed out of Vassar early on, and ended up in the theater instead, in the costume department.

Of the two, Euphoria is the more deeply felt and affecting. City of Girls, by contrast, mostly stays on the surface with hints of darker doings underneath. It is very amusing and the characters offer each other one zinger after another, much in the style of the comic plays Vivian’s theater puts on. The characters, too, are largely surface creations that only hint at deeper history and heart. I was starting to get a bit bored with all the one-liners when the story took a turn, as the theater attempts to put on a real play—one worthy of the great British actress who comes there seeking refuge after her home in London is bombed. The pace of the story begins to peek up at this spot but - to nod at the sewing theme of the novel - the seams of narrative show a bit too much. In a way it is polished almost to the point of being slick, but in another it shows its imperfections. As if Gilbert got a bit too carried away with the admittedly wonderful voice and briefly lost track of what the rest of the story was about.

I don’t want to be too harsh about City of Girls, because the first hundred pages often had me laughing out loud. I love the character of Mr. Herbert, who writes all the silly one-step-above-vaudeville vignettes but has to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling when asked to write a good play. The story did pick up where it needed to. But I felt I got just a tad too much of a feel for the backstage of the writing.