Tag: Elizabeth Gilbert

Review 1455: City of Girls

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So far, it’s hard to predict what Elizabeth Gilbert will write from one novel to the next. I read Eat, Pray, Love reluctantly, because it was so popular and I resisted reading a memoir by someone so young. But I loved it for its style and humor. The Signature of All Things was an enthralling 19th century story about the life of an unusual woman.

In City of Girls, Gilbert re-creates 20th century Manhattan, beginning in 1940. Vivian Morris is a heedless Vassar dropout with no idea what she wants to do and no inclination to do anything. Her status-conscious parents finally ship her off to her Aunt Peg in New York. Peg is the owner of a crumbling old theater in Hell’s Kitchen that puts on brainless entertainment for working class clientele.

Vivian begins a life of drunken nights running around town with the theater’s chorus girls and sleeping with just about anyone and days making costumes for the shows. For Vivian’s talent is sewing.

In the four-story building where the theater is located live Aunt Peg and her partner Olive as well as a motley crew of chorus girls, musicians, and others from the shows. Vivian is delighted to be given the apartment of Aunt Peg’s husband, the debonair Billy Buell, who hasn’t lived there in years. But things change after Peg offers a home to the famous British actress, Edna Parker Watson, whose home was destroyed in the Blitz. Peg decides to stage a good production for Edna, and Billy arrives to help write it.

The show is a success, but shortly thereafter, Vivian takes a fall because of her own foolishness. She ends up returning to her parents’ home in disgrace.

So far, the book was of a piece, even if I didn’t find Vivian a particularly interesting or sympathetic character. But that’s just the first half of the book. During the second half, when a wiser Vivian returns to New York to help out her aunt during the war and proceeding for the next 30 years, I began to wonder what the heck the book was about. It just seems to meander around a lot before coming to an admittedly poignant point.

The conceit employed by the novel is that the entire long novel is a letter to a woman answering her long-ago question of how Vivian knew her father. I think this first-person narrative is a weakness, because I can’t imagine someone writing some of this stuff to anyone, let alone a near stranger. Further, the second half of the novel seems like a different, less purposeful book.

It sounds like I disliked this book. I didn’t, I just feel it has problems, and I never warmed to Vivian.

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Day 449: The Signature of All Things

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Cover for The Signature of All ThingsBest Book of the Week!

I was not really eager to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love a few years ago for my book club, especially the pray part. But I discovered writing that was comic and intelligent and a story that was much more interesting than I expected.

In The Signature of All Things, Gilbert turns to fiction to tell the story of the life of a remarkable woman. Alma Whittaker is the daughter of a man born in poverty, the son of a frutier for Kew Gardens. Determined to become a wealthy gentleman, Henry Whittaker as a boy steals cuttings from the gardens to sell, and after he is caught, is dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks to gather plants on several voyages of discovery, including Captain Cook’s last.

Eventually, Henry breaks from Banks to start a pharmaceutical industry in Philadelphia. He marries a Dutch wife from a family of botanists and builds a series of greenhouses filled with plants from around the world.

Alma spends her childhood roaming the woods around her house and becomes a brilliant botanist but an unattractive girl and woman, tall and ungainly. She is much better with plants than with people, and when her mother Beatrix decides to adopt the beautiful orphaned daughter of a local prostitute, Alma is never able to develop a sisterly feeling for Prudence.

Although Alma spends much of her life there on her father’s estate, it is nonetheless an exceptional one, as she develops her own professional reputation, and eventually she ends up traveling farther than she ever expected she might. Gilbert takes time with her—time to develop her into a complex personality.

The course of her life takes a fateful turn when she encounters Ambrose Pike, an artist who has been living in South America and has painted the most beautiful pictures of orchids she has ever seen. Ambrose is of a spiritual turn of mind. He believes in the “signature of all things,” an old idea that god has left his imprint on everything on earth so that man will know its use. Although Alma, as a scientist, understands the fallacies in this notion, she finds she loves the man. But he has ideas about the pursuit of human perfection that she doesn’t comprehend.

This novel is beautifully written, completely different from Gilbert’s first book except for being a voyage through a human heart. I became fully engaged with Alma’s story. I grieved with her over her romantic disappointments and was impressed by how she snapped herself back into a productive life. This novel is an enthralling and satisfying story of an early woman scientist, about how a lonely but determined woman makes her own place in the world. Although Alma is not really a lovable person, Gilbert is able to make readers understand and care about her.