Joan Silber’s novel In the City opens with a deeply familiar gesture: a teenage girl leaves home to assimilate herself into a romanticized bohemian subculture. Pauline, a Jewish girl from Newark, possesses the boldness and vanity one might expect of a young woman who wants nothing less than the admiration and attachment of “a circle of people who did artistic and outrageous things.” Above all, she craves public recognition for her relationships rather than for her own artistic production. Though she finds herself quickly swept up by her new community, finding genuine intellectual and personal fulfillment as she curates her public and private identities proves much more challenging.

Set in the 1920s against the backdrop of the Sacco and Vanzetti trials, the atmosphere of In the City is politically charged. Pauline’s coming-of-age, including the slow growth and revision of her personal convictions, occurs on the periphery of radical activism. Pauline remains on the fringes of a political awakening. Her acts of witnessing—reading the news, overhearing conversations in crowded parties, listening to her friends’ impassioned support of various causes—show her developing and vaguely articulating, if only to herself, her allegiances and beliefs.

Pauline’s hesitation and self-preoccupation are informed by a wish to appear disciplined and refined. She laments that her immigrant parents don’t understand how things really work, and she aspires to be perceived, above all else, as in the know. A student of Latin, Pauline “had also been secretly much impressed by the doctrine that through the discipline of Latin the mind attained a certain purity of reasoning and took on classical habits of thought.” Pauline’s desire is certainly telling, for these habits of mind promise to serve as anchors when the rest of her world feels loose, experimental, or otherwise chaotic. 

But Pauline often proves surprisingly complacent and more concerned with performing maturity than with securing her own safety. As the novel opens, Pauline is sexually assaulted in public by a man named Earl, who becomes a spectral presence—a figure she scans for in hopes he isn’t lurking whenever she exits the train terminal. Perhaps unexpectedly, Pauline does not explicitly frame this encounter as an assault nor does she name Earl a predator. Instead, she emphasizes her conditioned complicity, willingly kissing the man back “by habit since she was proud of not being cold or timid.” Her quiet submission eventually does give way to fear: not only the fear of running into him again and having to submit once again to his brazen advances, but a worry that he’ll have deciphered her parents’ phone number. Instead of letting this event become legible to someone else, she sits privately with the acknowledgement that “it seemed strangest to her that her life contained this now forever; it awed her beyond everything.” 

How to read Pauline’s assault alongside her consensual sexual encounters? The shock of realizing that she will always carry with her the feeling of Earl’s violation stands in stark contrast to a welcome archive of early sexual encounters, unforgettable teenage flings. Even when the novel is not narratively complex, Silber’s strength lies in her gorgeous prose and ability to capture the sometimes beautiful, sometimes naïve psychological realities and rationales of adolescence. Recounting the “smug nostalgia” of an evening hookup that Pauline will soon report to her best friend:

She kept going over the exact sequence of it; she wanted, if anything, more mental repetition, a more insistent record, since the experience had otherwise all the vagueness of the invisible, witnessed, after all, with her eyes closed. It was to rescue all of it from the blurred realm of private evidence that she always reported everything that happened on dates to her friend Bunny, but these were only lists and lacked the audacious nuance of the real thing. 

In these moments, her desire to capture in vivid detail the memories of such fleeting pleasures becomes a way to tide herself over until her serious adult relationships begin.

But as Pauline later invests in a relationship with Dewey, a man she initially dislikes for the way he speaks, she finds herself unrecognizable. Suddenly impulsive and quick to anger, “she felt now that she was speaking out of a reflex that being with Dewey called up in her, and that this was something temporary and artificial, a masking of her actual character.” Silber precisely captures the experience of playing house with an awful man. Pauline forgives his compulsive spending, willingness to deceive his collaborators, and violent tendencies, hoping that the precarity of their cohabitation is only temporary. As a young woman of limited means, Pauline is caught in a familiar trap, convincing herself to stay in a bad relationship while hoping that that her patience will be rewarded eventually.
Though Pauline’s romantic entanglements can feel more frustrating than comforting, Silber excels at depicting young adult female friendships that require reflection and recalibration. As she drifts, physically then emotionally, from her hometown friend Bunny, Pauline enters relationships defined less by personal history and more by empathy and shared circumstances. In some ways, In the City is a convincing portrait of female friendship, of intimacy derived from navigating the varied uncertainties of the present: dating dubiously committed men, securing financial independence, and finding a firmer foothold in the cultural capitol they call home. It is ultimately these alliances between women that make Silber’s novel feel as current now as it was when it was initially published in 1987.

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Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction. Her first novel won the PEN/ Hemingway Award in 1981; she’s also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, and she’s received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, with her dog Jolie.

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Gabrielle Stecher Woodward writes essays and criticism highlighting the stories we tell about creative women. Her book reviews have been published in American Book Review, Film Quarterly, Harvard Review, and Woman’s Art Journal, among other venues. She holds a PhD from the University of Georgia. Explore her portfolio at www.gabriellestecher.com.