THE LONELY CITY

NONFICTION

Nuggets for the unloved

THE LONELY CITY:
Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

By Olivia Laing

316 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

This book is not for everyone. 

Laing begins by musing, “Imagine standing by a window at night on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them…(a) commonplace urban phenomenon…a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.”

Laing’s author photo, although a touch wistful, doesn’t look much like the solitary sad sack who narrates the book. Yet these are her recollected feelings from early years. She came to New York to join a new lover who dumped her as she was en route. She had work, but “the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.”

The author decides she looks like one of those isolated women in a Hopper painting. From there she segues into an analysis of Edward Hopper himself, a withdrawn, unreadable person who found it difficult to talk and never could reveal where his works came from. Outwardly dignified, he was in fact a rather nasty man, denigrating the work of his artist wife – who threw herself into promoting and abetting his work – and sometimes lapsing into knock-down-drag-out fights with her. 

She sees Hopper’s ambiguous scenes as “a testament to human isolation, to the essential unknowability of others.” The reason his work is so popular, she concludes, is that looking at such paintings “was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’ strange, estranging spell.”

From Hopper, Laing segues to the pop artist Andy Warhol, for whom “otherness” was his stock in trade. Yet, the author says, Warhol was a profoundly lonely human being.

Laing finds her own isolation compounded by language – the barista she deals with every morning never manages to understand Laing’s English accent. “My fascination with Warhol did not begin until…I happened upon a couple of television interviews and was struck by how hard he seemed to be struggling with the demands of speech.”

Warhol’s multiples, his repetitious silkscreens, emphasize the glamor of sameness, the conventional culture that rejected him, Laing says. Once he decided he would rather be alone, the artist found himself sought out, surrounded and suffocated by more people than he wanted. He set up a studio in a grungy abandoned space he called the Silver Factory, where he could go off in a corner and work while his hangers-on hung about. One of those people was an unstable woman, Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol after trying to collaborate with him.

Laing moves on to Halloween in New York and an inevitable discussion of masks as the loner’s defense. An obscure artist, David Wojnarowicz, described here as one of the stars of the East Village art scene, survived a brutal childhood to make “Rimbaud in New York,” a series of photographs of friends masked as the French author. Simultaneously he cruised the Chelsea piers, abandoned rotting buildings occupied by squatters and the dissolute, “a landscape of decay, of ruined grandeur reclaimed by a dissident, hedonistic population.”

At this point in the book I began to feel hopelessly mainstream. Wojnarowicz’ dangerous sexual adventures in the piers, documented in his own diaries and in photographs by other artists, evoke for Laing a need for “an expansion of erotic space, an extension of my sense of what might be possible or acceptable.” She defends gay promiscuity as a seeking of touch and – even if momentary – a sense of being accepted and wanted.

The author turns to the Internet, seeing “how the network might appeal to someone in the throes of chronic loneliness, with its pledge of connection, its beautiful, slippery promises of anonymity and control.” Sometimes she invents fictional identities for ads on Craigslist; sometimes in her own person she makes a date but never a second. She analyzes the human-cyber relationship, quoting a psychologist “who has become increasingly wary of the ability of computers to nourish us in the ways we seem to want then to…it facilitates a dangerously pleasurable self-forgetfulness.”

There are many re-readable nuggets here for those who feel unloved. There are interesting tidbits about the famous and the not-so-famous. There are wise insights. Not quite classifiable as biography or memoir or sociology or psychological delving, The Lonely City takes its readers on a strange and ultimately unsettling journey.

Hard as I tried, I couldn’t persuade myself to like it.