Most everything Vivian Gornick writes here could apply as well to re-watching films—except that the act of reading requires a level of imaginative engagement unlike any other. No one is showing you what the characters or their settings look like (unless we’re talking graphic novels, a different form altogether). As much memoir as literary criticism, Unfinished Business is slender yet dense, a set of essays about some of the books that once moved her (or not) and how they struck her differently, sometimes (not always) more profoundly at 40 than at 20.
“I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L,” Gornick writes. And as she grew older came the realization that life is more complicated, mysterious, than she once thought. Among the novelists she reinvestigates are D.H. Lawrence, Colette, Thomas Hardy and Delmore Schwartz. The latter’s The World is a Wedding gives her reason to consider the outsider perspectives shared by Jewish-American authors in the 20thth century who “brought to the enterprise a language-changing brilliance that made literary history.”
