Vivian Gornick’s Elegy for the Novel?

Since their emergence in the eighteenth century, novels have shaped the modern age by cultivating the interior life of the self. The reading and re-reading of novels and the effects of this on her interiority form the subject of Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader. “I began rereading,” Gornick writes, “not only for the transporting pleasure of the story itself but also to understand what I was living through, and what I was to make of it.” (5)

Part literary criticism, part cultural criticism, part memoir, and part psychoanalysis (this latter perhaps the most modern sort of self-making), Unfinished Business represents the niche literary genre Elaine Showalter has termed “shelfies.”1Considering novelists ranging from the lesser known (such as Delmore Schwarz) to the better known (D. H. Lawrence, for example), and the forgotten (remember Colette?), Gornick