The Lonely City Analysis

The Book of Common Prayer offers an intercession for “our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone.” We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, “the essential unknowability of others” means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don’t we talk about it more openly? “What’s so shameful,” she asks, about “having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?” This daring and seductive book — ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known — raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an “uneasy combination of separation and exposure.”

“The Lonely City,”

In this way, the whole book can be read as a hyperliterate breakup memoir. There are far worse ways to go on the rebound, it turns out, than to get lost in art and a new

“Everything”? When gay marriage has become legal, transgender issues are at the fore and young people today are, if anything, obsessed with defending difference? She also says Manhattan is becoming “a kind of gated island for the superrich” — an assertion belied by her own “cheap sublets” and her magical walks along (as of press time) still toll-free sidewalks. The stridency of her critique of the “glossiness of late capitalism” feels out of step with the rest of the book’s subtle analysis — for example, of how society routinely fails the loneliest among us, as happened during the AIDS