Customer Reviews

Eve in the City: A Novel

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I may be the wrong reader for Rayfiel, although since I've just finished the third of his three novels I can't be too wrong. Others have criticized him for choosing to write in the first person about the sex life of a much younger female, so I won't join that chorus. If we made a rule that writers had to be the same age and sex as their protagonists then literature would be much impoverished. My problem is that I lose interest when characters drift off into dreamland and I'm not sure whether they're remembering things or imagining them. Rayfield did a lot of that in Split Levels. In Colony Girl he kept things anchored in his fictional real world but he's back at it again here.
Eve, from Colony Girl has arrived in Manhattan, at the age of 16 and obtained her own apartment. How she did that would have been an interesting story, since she's naïve and friendless and poor. Her only social contacts are in the bar where she's working off the books, for Victor, the illegal Mingrelian, who wants to marry her. She witnesses a rape and knife attack and goes to tell the police about it, but then isn't sure if she was imagining it or is telling lies about it. Some implausible melodramatic developments arise from this two hundred pages later but there's puzzlement rather than suspense build-up. Characters tend to be enigmatic and act in strange ways anyway.
Victor is the most interesting character and the most likely New Yorker, with realistic
money and housing dilemmas. I hope he's the center of the next Rayfiel.
Why should we bother to read the next Rayfiel? Just read the first four sentences of this one and you'll know why.

I loved COLONY GIRL and have been eagerly awaiting this sequel. While Eve grew up in a unique setting, a religious colony, she is now in a common situation: a young woman trying to find herself in Manhattan. But Rayfiel has vividly shown that the external situation is only tangential to the real setting, what goes on in Eve's mind. Fortunately, that place is sharp, funny and always surprising.

The novel is about gaps: between what is real and what you experience; between what others feel and how you perceive them; between expectations and reality. Throughout the compelling story, we root for Eve to discover that it's her own experiences and feelings that count. In a very satisfying conclusion, we see that she has, and are left wanting to see where that discovery will take her next.

One-named Eve leaves her conservative,religious, rural background and moves to New York City. She is seventeen with all the immature sensiblities that her age indicates.

This is my first Thomas Rayfiel novel. The book is billed as a love letter to the Big Apple. I spent years living in a big city and visited NYC on several occasions. I hoped for a depiction of the good that exists in the city ; the diversity that makes the city thrum. Instead, Rayfiel dwells on the seamy, desperate denizens of the city.

Author Rafiel writes well. It seems he wants to write a literary novel here but keeps returning to the plot devices of popular fiction. The result is uneven but intriguing enough to keep the reader interested.

But the biggest drawback to this novel is Eve's unredeeming flakiness. As we follow the processes of her mind, she appears schizophrenic much of the time and without a base of core values all of the time. Rayfiel does not, in this novel, explain the origin of this loss of a life foundation. Eve flits from one loser to another in search of the elixir of life although she knows not where to find it (Sex? Marriage? Elsewhere?)

The supporting cast is just as lost. An illegal alien who philosophizes about the shortcomings of Americans and their language ; fellow barmaids who nave no more clue of life than Eve ; dysfunctional artists ; a policeman ; and a wealthy man with no scruples. It makes for a readable but disappointing book.

The author ties up all the loose plot lines in the end, but leaves no real conclusion to Eve's story. I understand that she is a character from his previous novel, Colony girl. It is possible that novel explains some of the circumstances that created a mess like Eve. But I will not be reading it to find out.