An unbeatable beach read from ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ author Gilbert
‘City of Girls’ embraces … the power of a woman breaking from a traditional path and the wisdom of taking true, two-handed joy in the pleasures that life offers.
At the start of Elizabeth Gilbert’s muchanticipated new novel, “City of Girls,” the year is 1940, and Vivian Morris is a Vassar dropout shipped off by her well-to-do family to live with her offbeat Aunt Peg in Manhattan. To a pretty 19-year-old with no discernible ambition but an eye for all that’s beautiful, sensuous and frivolous — “a girl so freshly hatched there was practically yolk in my hair” — her arrival in the big city practically shocks her into consciousness, propelling her into a life worth telling about.
Vivian’s Aunt Peg owns the Lily Playhouse Theatre, a “grandiose” yet “crumbling” old palace that puts on schlock for its working-class neighborhood audience. Still, this world dazzles Vivian. The Lily attracts a wondrous hodgepodge of misfits: a tough-as-nails stunner of a showgirl named Celia; a cantankerous playwright who greets each day with doom and gloom; and a friend of Peg’s, Edna Parker Watson, an esteemed stage actress with impeccable style, who finds refuge at the Lily with her handsome lout of a husband after their London home is reduced to rubble during the Blitz.
Living above the theater in a fully furnished apartment — the stuff of fairy tales for young people moving
to New York now — Vivian embarks on a series of wanton adventures glued to the side of fast-living Celia, soaking up gin and male attention in one swanky nightclub after another.
Months after Vivian’s arrival, the Lily puts on a play that’s worthy of Edna Parker Watson’s star power. That play — “City of Girls” — reverses the fortunes of the shambling theater and turns it into a destination for New York’s elite. Gilbert unfurls the premiere of the play in rapturous, breathless chapters that, in a tour de force of literary mimicry, are punctuated with reviews by Brooks Atkinson from the New York Times and Walter Winchell of the defunct New York Daily Mirror.
The good days last just a little bit longer. When reflecting upon her adventures in show business and sex, Vivian is so prone to hyperbole she can appear to be hooked on hallucinogens; to her, everyone and everything in her new life is cranked up to impossible extremes: New York City is a synapse-frying wonderland orgy of booze and handsome men, Celia is a once-in-a-generation beauty, Aunt Peg is a largerthan-life bon vivant, Edna Parker Watson possesses unlimited stores of otherworldly charisma while her husband is the most doltish human to ever live.
This isn’t a criticism — a first move to the big city is an extreme experience for a young person, especially a beautiful, moneyed 19-year-old starting out in pre-World War II Manhattan. But just as the endless nights of waking up hung over in makeup-streaked sheets start to become monotonous — both to Vivian and to the reader — the fantasy comes to an abrupt end, when Vivian is mixed up in a ruinous scandal splashed all over the gossip rags.
The city spits Vivian out — temporarily, at least — thus setting off a surprising, more sober second half to her story, as World War II transforms the city and the world. It’s no spoiler to say this isn’t a novel about an indecorous woman’s descent into disgrace — Vivian harbors no shame in her checkered past; it’s her taste for sex and adventure, independence and rebellion, that makes her life worth following over seven decades.
For fans of Gilbert’s best-known work, “Eat, Pray, Love,” there are no concrete similarities with her juggernaut memoir. Yet “City of Girls” embraces some of the same themes: the power of a woman breaking from a traditional path and the wisdom of taking true, two-handed joy in the pleasures that life offers. The only other similarity? “City of Girls” is an unbeatable beach read, loaded with humor and insight.