Surface and Sound

In Fierce Attachments Vivian Gornick sits behind a sound board and masterfully dials up and down the colorful language of the Bronx, her mother’s one line zingers (“Drucker, you’re a whore”), the narrator’s reflections, and the inner dialogue and journey of Gornick herself, using one to set up the other, using one against the other, and weaving it all together with uncanny timing and poetic brilliance.

The narrator’s voice is often heard, seemingly with a physical description of someone. Of her childhood neighbor, Mrs. Kerner, she writes, “She was a terrible housekeeper who never stopped keeping house. At all times she had a rag tied around her head, a feather duster in her hand, and an expression of confusion in her eyes.” (27) Instantly, you see her genius: an ability to give you the outer and inner life of someone at the same time, her descriptions cut deeply into the characters around her, revealing so much.

Gazing out the window one day, she sees a woman who turns out to be a prostitute. “Her nylon stockings were loose and wrinkled around her ankles, and there was in her walk some muscular disconnect, as though she had been knocked apart like a puppet and put back together again badly.” (56) (Sentences like this make me realize why the introduction is so short. What can you say? “Let me read that to you again!”?) Throughout the book, Gornick appears to be giving you an aural or visual description of someone’s voice or appearance, but she’s really telling you who she thinks they are.

At times, Gornick brings all this together with powerful effect. When she and her mother have a discussion about a neighbor being gay, she plays the simple dialogue for us and then slides up the dial of her inner dialogue as she watches her mother.

“Now she is silent. She stares off into the middle distance in an odd, abstracted manner that has developed in her over the past year or so. She’s alone inside that faraway look on her face, but this alone is different from the alone I’m very familiar with…This alone is soft not bitter, full of interest, not a trace of self-pity in it. Now when her eyes narrow it is to take in more clearly what she knows, concentrate on what she has lived. She shakes herself as though from a penetrating dream. “

Now we waited just enough. Time to dial up the mom:

“People have a right to their lives,” she says quietly.” (61)

Gornick’s timing is astounding. She knows when to surface and when to sound.

Often she positions her own inner dialogue against her mother’s comments to show the bitter conflict between the two, to show how her own inner development is stunted by how her mother is in the world. There is a moment when she stumbles upon some watercolors in a gallery, which have great effect upon her. “The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers.” (102) Then she meets up with her mother and we hear the mother’s anxious voice “Do you have the rent this month?” and “Are they going to pay you for that review you wrote?” and “Why aren’t you wearing something warmer?” Suddenly, “The space inside begins to shimmer. The walls collapse inward…She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can she know this? She doesn’t even know I’m there.” (104)

Gornick uses these conflicts to flesh out the deep divide in her relationship with her mother, but she also uses them to chronicle her own growth in the way she responds to them. When she asks her mom how she liked a book she gave her, all her mom has to say is “listen” and the alarms start buzzing. “The smile drops off my face and my stomach contracts. That “listen” means she is about to trash the book I gave her…” Gornick keeps the pause button down long enough to play out a whole inner rant about what the mom is going to say. Then she hits play and the mom speaks it, and indeed trashes the book, verbatim, as predicted. (73)

It’s a funny, insightful scene, except then she takes it further, bringing it back inside. “Invariably, when she speaks so, my head fills with blood and before the sentences have stopped pouring from her mouth I am lashing out at her…However, in the past year an odd circumstances has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated by remain calm…Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us.” (73-74).

This is how growth is doled out in this book. Gornick doesn’t crank up the violins and give us big transformative moments. Rather, she shows us little chippings away at these so-called attachments, exposed by who is left standing after words and thoughts push up against each other again and again and again like tectonic plates.

After another argument, at the end of the book, is somehow diffused, she marvels,

“But it has no staying power, this undreamed-of equanimity. It drifts [continental drift?], it gets lost, flashes up with unreliable vibrancy, then refuses to appear when most needed, or puts in an appearance with its strength much reduced. The state of affairs between us is volatile. Flux is now our daily truth. The instability is an astonishment, shot through with mystery and promise. We are no longer nose to nose, she and I. A degree of distance has been permanently achieved. I glimpse the joys of detachment. This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.” (200)

-Evan