Visible City
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Voyeurism between NYC neighbors leads to surprising discoveries in this "glittering novel about fate, fantasy, and the anonymity of urban life" (O, The Oprah Magazine).
After chaotic days of wrangling and soothing her young children, Nina spends her evenings spying on the quiet, contented older couple across the street. But one night, watching the same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Confused and intrigued, Nina wonders who these people are, and what happened to her symbol of domestic happiness.
Then Nina crosses paths with both couples on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood. Soon, her innocent peeping gives way to a kind of intimacy that has everyone confronting their own desires and disappointments.
In Visible City, Tova Mirvis explores the boundaries between our own lives and the lives of others. From its lavish ghost subway stations to its hidden stained-glass windows, Visible City conjures a New York City teeming with buried treasures.
"An utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan [that] reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald . . . Brilliant." —Joanna Smith Rakoff, Salon.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"If you keep talking to strangers eventually they become friends." Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary) writes an intimate story about different types of relationships, including those with complete strangers. Mirvis sets her story on New York City's Upper West Side where two families live in high-rise apartments with their curtains open, one apartment's windows facing the other's. Nina, a restless ex-lawyer and current stay-at-home mother, is in possession of her son's toy binoculars. To fill the lonely hours until her lawyer husband Jeremy gets home from work, she watches, with admiration and growing jealousy, an older couple across the way. One evening, instead of seeing two peaceful companions reading quietly on the couch, Nina sees a youthful couple (temporarily staying in the older couple's apartment) in a lustful and heated embrace. The sight makes Nina reinterpret the comfortable and quiet love of the older couple, and wish for something closer to what the young couple has. Her new mindset is further complicated when fate steps in, and the lives of Nina's family and the strangers in the window collide. In this story of chance and the temptation of change, Mirvis elicits the reader's sympathy for her characters' conflicting desires.
