Here are two exceptional, and closely related books I’ve read recently – both about cities, both about art – and that have provided matter for reflection and inspiration as I become ever more deeply immersed in my new novel project.
In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing finds herself adrift in New York as what was supposed to be a new life with a new lover is transformed by a single phone call into a period of acute loneliness and personal change. In making her way – cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence – around a city she finds it difficult to pin down as friend or foe, Laing examines the lives of others who have found themselves alone in the Big Apple, and the visionary, sometimes tormented art that has resulted from this experience. Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, Vivian Maier, Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz especially become Laing’s subjects but also her companions as she interrogates the idea of loneliness: how does loneliness differ from being alone, and is loneliness, by default, an inalienable part of the creative condition?
In Flaneuse, Lauren Elkin examines the traditionally male pursuit of city-walking through the prism of the various cities she has lived in and the women who have proven by practice that observing and writing the city is not just for men. New York, Paris, Venice, London are revisited and recharted against the backdrop of a novel-in-progress and a disintegrating relationship – is the third point in this triangle actually Tokyo? – as Elkin struggles to decide which is truly ‘home’. In tracking the footsteps of Sophie Calle, Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, Elkin reveals the art of ‘street haunting’ as a universal pursuit, a magnetic force that, for those who love cities, has been a guiding inspiration for women even when they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be there.
There are more and more of us out there, writing the bones.