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A review by tiagoalves
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
informative
reflective
medium-paced
1.25
This book started well, fizzled out in the blink of an eye, and then ended horribly.
The blurb, that I read a few years ago, drew me in. Its first chapter, describing loneliness as a city in itself and beginning to explore that feeling in a city as born out of separation but also exposure was fantastic. Then Laing went into the biographical content that mostly built this book, rather than the memoir I was expecting alongside the study of loneliness in art.
We learn about the lives of Hopper, Warhol, Wojnarowicz, Solanas, Darger, and so on, but what we read is all very surface-level. It goes on interminable tangents that don’t seem to relate at all with the main point the book promises us, only then to fail miserably in considering the many nuances of loneliness, cowering solely behind the word ‘lonely’ and never having the boldness to explore anything else for over 250 pages.
This was researched, but the thing is that you can tell it was researched, and not in a good way. It reads as if Laing had googled ‘lonely’ and ‘new york’ and created an amalgamation of the results and divided them into chapters. The art analysis is paradoxically shallow and generic, while also being over-explained and too drawn out.
The problem is that Laing seems to promise to set out in one direction through the main road, but she chooses to go someplace else and uses a shortcut. She pours over an artist’s life for over 30 pages and then suddenly remembers “oh right, I have to relate this to loneliness and to me somehow” so she decides to say “this is why he was lonely and this is the same way I felt a few years after in the same street where he was once” and then dips. These short allusions to loneliness and to her own experience quickly started to feel like a cop out from actually reflecting on loneliness by herself—she resorted a bit too much to quotes from her sources and ended up not sharing much more than her generic, vague, and not too bound opinions.
Shout out to chapter six, which dealt with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, for being the best chapter in the book, but it couldn’t save this book.
The blurb, that I read a few years ago, drew me in. Its first chapter, describing loneliness as a city in itself and beginning to explore that feeling in a city as born out of separation but also exposure was fantastic. Then Laing went into the biographical content that mostly built this book, rather than the memoir I was expecting alongside the study of loneliness in art.
We learn about the lives of Hopper, Warhol, Wojnarowicz, Solanas, Darger, and so on, but what we read is all very surface-level. It goes on interminable tangents that don’t seem to relate at all with the main point the book promises us, only then to fail miserably in considering the many nuances of loneliness, cowering solely behind the word ‘lonely’ and never having the boldness to explore anything else for over 250 pages.
This was researched, but the thing is that you can tell it was researched, and not in a good way. It reads as if Laing had googled ‘lonely’ and ‘new york’ and created an amalgamation of the results and divided them into chapters. The art analysis is paradoxically shallow and generic, while also being over-explained and too drawn out.
The problem is that Laing seems to promise to set out in one direction through the main road, but she chooses to go someplace else and uses a shortcut. She pours over an artist’s life for over 30 pages and then suddenly remembers “oh right, I have to relate this to loneliness and to me somehow” so she decides to say “this is why he was lonely and this is the same way I felt a few years after in the same street where he was once” and then dips. These short allusions to loneliness and to her own experience quickly started to feel like a cop out from actually reflecting on loneliness by herself—she resorted a bit too much to quotes from her sources and ended up not sharing much more than her generic, vague, and not too bound opinions.
Shout out to chapter six, which dealt with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, for being the best chapter in the book, but it couldn’t save this book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Sexual violence, Terminal illness, Violence, and Blood
Moderate: Bullying, Domestic abuse, Rape, Suicidal thoughts, and Suicide attempt
Minor: Abandonment