In the City

Like all young people who move to Manhattan from elsewhere, Pauline sees her arrival in the city as an escape from the provincial entrapments of home. She seeks something more than her quiet life with her rough-mannered family in bucolic Newark, New Jersey: a frugal but free-wheeling existence among the artists, writers, and musicians flocking to the city in the 1920s, a life filled with books, impassioned conversation, and unencumbered sex.

Pauline falls in with an ostentatious group of friends who spend their nights in speakeasies and all-night cafes in Greenwich Village, exemplars of the bohemian life. There is Nita, an outspoken violinist who wants a rich husband; Rose, who lives in a hotel, waiting for her married lover to call; Peter, a painter with roving interests; and Walter, wealthy, older, and forever divorcing his wife. Yet even among these new friends, life in the city is grueling. Pauline can hardly afford food and clothing; the room she rents is cramped and mildewy. She becomes involved with a set of arrogant men: a self-proclaimed writer more interested in spending other people’s money than producing anything meaningful, and a handsome recluse unable to stomach her libertine lifestyle. Pauline’s effort to disentangle herself from these relationships and the elusive ideal of living young and free in the city forms a wry, finely-observed, and moving portrait of a woman’s self-making.

Originally published in 1987, In the City is a sharp, emotionally sophisticated portrait of a young woman trying to claim a life of her own in an indifferent world. With its nuance and quiet power, the novel reveals the clarity, wit, and emotional precision that have defined Joan Silber’s celebrated body of work ever since.