Visible City [electronic resource] :

Title:

Author:

Mirvis, Tova.

Description:

-- Visible City --

Publisher:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

Date:

2014

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

Voyeurism between NYC neighbors leads to surprising discoveries in this " glittering novel about fate, fantasy, and the anonymity of urban life" ( O , The Oprah Magazine ).

After chaotic days of wrangling and soothing her young children, Nina spends her evenings spying on the quiet, contented older couple across the street. But one night, watching the same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Confused and intrigued, Nina wonders who these people are, and what happened to her symbol of domestic happiness.

Then Nina crosses paths with both couples on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood. Soon, her innocent peeping gives way to a kind of intimacy that has everyone confronting their own desires and disappointments.

In Visible City , Tova Mirvis explores the boundaries between our own lives and the lives of others. From its lavish ghost subway stations to its hidden stained-glass windows, Visible City conjures a New York City teeming with buried treasures.

"An utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan [that] reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald . . . Brilliant." --Joanna Smith Rakoff, Salon.com

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

"If you keep talking to strangers. eventually they become friends." Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary) writes an intimate story about different types of relationships, including those with complete strangers. Mirvis sets her story on New York City's Upper West Side where two families live in high-rise apartments with their curtains open, one apartment's windows facing the other's. Nina, a restless ex-lawyer and current stay-at-home mother, is in possession of her son's toy binoculars. To fill the lonely hours until her lawyer husband Jeremy gets home from work, she watches, with admiration and growing jealousy, an older couple across the way. One evening, instead of seeing two peaceful companions reading quietly on the couch, Nina sees a youthful couple (temporarily staying in the older couple's apartment) in a lustful and heated embrace. The sight makes Nina reinterpret the comfortable and quiet love of the older couple, and wish for something closer to what the young couple has. Her new mindset is further complicated when fate steps in, and the lives of Nina's family and the strangers in the window collide. In this story of chance and the temptation of change, Mirvas elicits the reader's sympathy for her characters' conflicting desires. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

Anyone who has spent time in Manhattan or watched Hitchcock's Rear Window will recognize the voyeuristic pleasure that jump-starts Mirvis' (The Outside World, 2004, etc.) third novel, as a bored young mother stands at her apartment window watching across-the-street neighbors in their living room, unaware that the two families' lives will soon intertwine. While her lawyer husband, Jeremy, works all hours at his high-pressure firm arranging large real estate development deals, lawyer-turnedstay-at-home-mom Nina is going a little nuts. Trapped in her Upper West Side apartment with 3-year-old Max and baby Lily, Nina spends lonely nights watching a couple reading together in what looks like companionable silence in the building across from hers. Then one day, the couple is replaced by a young woman in a leg cast who argues, then makes love with a young man, aware that she is being watched. The young woman is Emma, who has moved back in with her parentsart historian Claudia and therapist Leonwhile her broken ankle heals and she decides how to get out of her engagement. Running into Claudia on the street, Nina recognizes her former professor, who never encouraged her. Nina's friend Wendy, who presents herself as a perfect mommy, turns out to be one of Leon's more unhappy patients. Avoiding involvement with his wife and daughter, Leon spends his happiest hours moving his Volvo to obey parking rules. Leon and Nina meet in the neighborhood coffee shop and begin a flirtation. Meanwhile, Jeremy faces a professional crisis that will impact everyone. (The author's previous fictions were explorations of specifically Jewish communities, and while Mirvis makes only passing mention of Jeremy's Orthodox upbringing, there is no mistaking her characters' ethnicity.) It becomes clear that how people appear in the tableaux created by window frames and how they are in real space can be very different. This dark, witty, if slightly overstructured comedy about deceptive appearances evolves into a moving examination of intimacy's limitations.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Nina, a lawyer turned stay-at-home-mom of three-year-old Max and baby Lily, takes to looking out the window of her Upper West Side apartment into the building across the street. She's particularly drawn to the window of a middle-aged husband and wife who seem to share their solitude with the young woman on crutches living with them. Nearby construction of luxury apartments, replacing old torn-down buildings, brings people outside, and Nina meets Leon, a psychologist, the man she has been watching, whose wife, Claudia, turns out to be the college teacher whose class Nina loved and whose daughter, Emma, with her broken ankle, becomes the babysitter beloved by Max and Lily. As connections form between characters, including Claudia as well as Nina's husband, Jeremy, a disenchanted real-estate lawyer, looking into the lives of others helps them move toward watersheds in their own lives. In a departure from her earlier faith-based novels (The Ladies' Auxiliary, 1999; The Outside World, 2004), Mirvis focuses her artful prose on the inner lives of modern women and those they love as they face the possibilities of change.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

THE FACADE OF a classic prewar New York City apartment building - the opening image of Tova Mirvis's third novel, "Visible City" - presents a plain-spoken metaphor for human acquaintance. Meeting a stranger, you may walk past without interest or, intrigued by a glimpse of color or movement, strive to see more and deeper, beyond the mannerly surface. Unlike those riskier "rear window" views, streetfront views shed light primarily on the most predictable of daytime activities. Peer long enough, however, and you might witness something more private. In her earlier novels, Mirvis chose Orthodox Judaism as her cultural context; in "Visible City," she turns to the willfully secular, intellectually privileged world of upper-middle-class Upper West Side Manhattan. Nina, the central character, is the textbook post-professional mother who met her husband in law school ("We used to pull all-nighters together, footnoting"), her ambition matching his until she stepped aside to raise their children. Jeremy now works grueling hours handling real estate deals, stranding Nina at home with a baby to nurse and a 3-year-old, Max, to entertain. Through long, solitary evenings while they sleep, Nina gazes in boredom and voyeuristic longing at the building across the street, "hoping to see not just the outrageous or the extraordinary, but any truthful moment of small ordinary." She fixates on one window through which she frequently sees a middle-aged couple "reading contentedly on their couch. The couple rarely talked to one another, but neither of them seemed bothered by the silence." One evening she sees there, instead, a young woman on crutches. A man approaches the woman, seems to argue with her, and then cajoles her onto the couch, undresses and makes love to her. Nina watches the entire act, any shame trumped by her lonely yearnings and then by a fantasy that the other woman senses and welcomes her attention. This is an enticingly intimate overture to a story that quickly broadens to accommodate several points of view, including those of the overworked, increasingly desperate Jeremy and the middle-aged couple spied upon by Nina: Leon, an attractive, self-centered psychologist, and his wife, Claudia, an art historian who no longer teaches but finds consolation in the academic promise of their daughter, Emma. At work on a dissertation, engaged to marry an up-and-coming fiction writer, Emma is the woman on crutches, living with her parents while recovering from a broken ankle (an injury whose true cause she's hiding). The morning after Nina watches Emma and her fiancé make love, she strikes up a conversation in a nearby Starbucks with a man she gradually recognizes as the male half of the reading couple on that well-used couch. All at once, an escalating series of serendipitous connections begins to guide the plot. Jeremy, going AWOL from his law firm, has a chance encounter with Claudia that draws him into her search for a lost stained-glass masterpiece; when he becomes fascinated with a blog on underground New York, it turns out that the blogger works in his office building. We learn that Claudia was a professor of Nina's at Columbia and that one of Leon's patients is Nina's close friend Wendy, an imperiously perfectionist, Purell-packing mother of twins who spells out words like h-a-t-e and tries to incite public outrage against a cafe where children are asked to pipe down. (You can't help praying that somebody hands this woman a copy of Jennifer Senior's "All Joy and No Fun," pronto.) Not surprisingly, this narrative cat's-cradle strains credibility, especially the outcome of Claudia's obsessive quest. Yet Mirvis seems at times to be striving for the magical logic of fables, most tellingly in her frequent allusions to Max's rich imaginary life, "where the real effortlessly intermingled with the pretend," implicitly asking readers to suspend disbelief a degree or two further than usual. She's also invoking an ironic truism about New York City that any longtime resident will affirm: It is a small world after all. But while the Disney song (cited twice) trumpets that news as reassuring, this novel takes a darker view. The more closely intertwined these lives become, the more they threaten to fracture. The more the characters examine their relationships and the lofty vocations they've chosen, the more they doubt not just their happiness but the authenticity and maturity of their choices. As Jeremy reflects, "He had gone to college, to law school; he had married, had two children of his own - cocooning himself in all the things he was supposed to be - yet he had never grown past the larval stage of his own becoming." It turns out that this story is not primarily about the difficulty of knowing the people to whom we believe ourselves close. It's about how hard it is to really know ourselves, to see how rarely we become what we (or our parents) expect ourselves to be - and how isolating it feels to arrive at this realization. "Welcome to adulthood," Leon says to Nina as their acquaintance deepens. "What you thought it was going to be like has nothing to with anything." In fact, Nina's and Wendy's notions of the ideal domestic life are as unrooted in reality as Max's notions about his imaginary friend and his pet tadpole. And as Emma's illusions about her engagement wear thin, so do her parents' illusions about their marriage. Unfortunately, as the characters' self-recriminations lead them toward daring, sometimes foolhardy acts, their collective loneliness mounts toward an excess of fraught eulogizing for all they've lost. "She was in battle with herself, so much still unexplored," the abject Nina ponders. "Eventually she would find a more definitive answer. Life itself was reckless. Despite all attempts to the contrary, no one made it through unscathed." Two pages later, Leon berates himself: "For how long had he and Claudia mistaken silence for companionship, how long had loneliness been dressed up to look like anything but? Now that he felt such loneliness, it was hard to bear for a single moment, yet he had borne it unknowingly all these years." Eloquent and true as such passages may be, Mirvis underestimates how clearly these revelations come through in her characters' actions. As the novel rises to its literally ground-shaking climax, "Visible City" threatens to collapse under the weight of so much explicit introspection. At the same time, it ushers the characters toward believable, necessary reckonings. Along the way, it offers numerous visceral pleasures to veterans of New York City living, especially in its portrayal of behavior that would hardly be tolerated anywhere else. Leon, habituated by the city's alternate-side parking regulations to spending hours every week just sitting in his Volvo, regards the car as his true home. Urban motherhood forces Nina to push a stroller "to the end of Manhattan if necessary" in order to get her children to sleep; she parks it in front of dusty, loud construction sites just to distract Max and negotiates unnerving encounters with "the crazy woman whom . . . she saw nearly every day." There's the guerrilla group who don black trench coats to prowl the forbidden recesses of the subway system; the pushy pamphleteers fighting the onslaught of high-rise development; and Dog Man, the crank who polices the laundry room in Nina's building, putting up signs to dictate the proper use of dryers and accusing people of stealing his socks. When Dog Man unfolds into a poignant flesh-and-blood character, we root for him to find love - and it's in these narrative interstices that Mirvis's meticulously choreographed novel surprises and moves us. She shows the city for what it is behind all its windows and walls: a vast constellation of those "truthful moments" her heroine seeks, as numerous as the stars. JULIA GLASS'S new novel, "And the Dark Sacred Night," was just published.

Excerpts

One down and two across, there she was again, a lone woman in the window, pressed close to the glass. For several days, she had been there on and off, standing in front of the window, on crutches, as if wanting to be seen. Inside her own apartment, Nina stopped to watch. She was disturbed by the young woman's presence, proprietary on behalf of the middle-aged couple whom she'd come to expect in that window, reading contentedly on their couch. The couple rarely talked to one another, but neither of them seemed bothered by the silence. Sometimes the husband disappeared from view, returning with two mugs in hand. Occasionally the wife stretched her legs toward her husband and he absent-mindedly grasped one of her feet. But once Nina had looked out as the wife started to walk away and the husband stood and pulled her closer. Caught off guard by the gesture, the woman had nearly stumbled, and to steady her, he pulled her into an embrace. To everyone's surprise, he twirled her, and for a few minutes before resuming their quiet routine, they had danced. Nina's living room window offered no sweeping city views, no glimpse of the river or the sky, only the ornate prewar building across the street. She and Jeremy had lived in this Upper West Side apartment for five years but still hadn't gotten around to buying shades. Even though she looked into other people's windows, she'd convinced herself that no one was, in turn, watching them. With two sleeping kids, she couldn't leave the apartment, but it was enough to look out at the varieties of other people's lives. At nine in the evening the windows across the street were like the rows of televisions in an electronics store, all visible at once. Nina's eyes flickered back and forth, but she inevitably returned to watching the same square, waiting for the couple to reappear, their quiet togetherness stirring her desire to ride out of her apartment into theirs. Hoping to find them there again, hoping that this might be the night in which they looked up from their books, she didn't move, not until she was pulled away by the scream of a child. The interminable cycle of sleeping and waking had begun. In his bedroom, her three-year-old son, Max, was thrashing, yet asleep. His eyes were open but he saw no way out of his nightmare, no path to outrun whatever pursued him. "There's nothing to be afraid of," she whispered into Max's ear, and his crying subsided. An hour later, it was Lily. From the bassinet that was squeezed into her and Jeremy's bedroom, Nina picked her up to nurse. As soon as Lily latched on, her crying ceased. For the moment, there was nothing more her daughter needed. Before either of the kids woke again, Nina went back to the window, hoping to see not just the outrageous or the extraordinary, but any truthful moment of small ordinary. During the day, every feeling came shellacked with protective plastic coating. The only language spoken was certainty. Outwardly, she was reciting the maxims along with everyone else: The kids were always delicious and she wouldn't miss this for the world, and there was nowhere she'd rather be, and yes, it did go so fast. On the faces of other mothers, Nina sometimes caught the rumblings of discontent, but their inner lives were tucked away. Like theirs, her hands were always occupied, but while she was making dinner or bathing a child, while pushing one of them in a swing, rocking the other to sleep, her thoughts had begun to rove. In the window across the way, there was still no sign of the couple reading. Once again, it was the young woman on crutches looking out, and Nina was tempted to wave. But that would end the illusion. Curtains would be pulled shut, lights switched off, the city's windows suddenly empty and dark. Instead, Nina stayed hidden, and from the shadows, she watched as a young man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt emerged from another room and joined the young woman. Wide awake for the first time all day, Nina craned her neck, watching as the couple began to argue, their gestures sharp, their bodies taut. The man tried to hug her but the woman wriggled from his grasp, put her hands over her face, shielding herself from what he was saying. The woman turned away from the man, but he wasn't dissuaded by her anger. He came up behind her and pressed against her. He took her crutches from her and she leaned into him as he entangled his hands in her long dark hair, ran his lips down the nape of her neck, cupped her breasts in his hands. Nina felt the woman's resistance subsiding and she wished there was a way to draw closer to them still. Surely they realized they were before an open window; surely that was part of the pleasure. Could they see her breathing their every breath, feeling their every touch? The woman turned around, her back now to Nina, as the man carefully helped her to the couch where he knelt in front of her and pulled down her pants. As their dark clothes unpeeled, giving way to pale flashes of skin, Nina was inside her own body yet inside theirs as well. The woman's earlier reluctance was gone. She wasn't held back by her injured foot. Her thin body wriggled out from underneath and she climbed astride him. Her back arched, her body bare, she turned her face to the window, looking directly at the spot where Nina was standing. She saw the look of defiance and understood the bold exhibitionist plea. But it was something else that made her want to press herself to the glass pane and move closer still. This woman was trying to let her know, "I see you, I know you are there." In response, she wanted to reach her hand across and loosen the constraints of her own life as well. The city had cracked momentarily apart, a slivered opening in the larger night. Nina might be home with her kids, another interminable night with Jeremy at work, but she was also outside, part of the thrumming city. Nina waited for the reading couple to emerge from some back room where they'd been hiding and join the younger couple on their couch. She waited to see everyone's inner thoughts transmitted in flashes of light long and short. For every apartment in every building to light up. For neighbors everywhere to strip down, lay themselves bare. For the couples across the way to raise their windows and invite her in. Excerpted from Visible City by Tova Mirvis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.