For fans of Meg Wolitzer and Allegra Goodman, an intimate and provocative novel about three couples whose paths intersect in their New York City neighborhood, forcing them all to weigh the comfort of stability against the costs of change. Nina is a harried young mother who spends her evenings spying on the older couple across the street through her son’s Fisher-Price binoculars. She is drawn to their quiet contentment—reading on the couch, massaging each other’s feet—so unlike her own lonely, chaotic world of nursing and soothing and simply getting by. One night, through that same window, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Who are these people, and what happened to her symbol of domestic bliss? In the coming weeks, Nina encounters the older couple, Leon and Claudia, their daughter Emma and her fiancé, and many others on the streets of her Upper West Side neighborhood, eroding the safe distance of her secret vigils. Soon anonymity gives way to different—and sometimes dangerous—forms of intimacy, and Nina and her neighbors each begin to question their own paths. With enormous empathy and a keen observational eye, Tova Mirvis introduces a constellation of characters we all know: twenty-somethings unsure about commitments they haven’t yet made; thirty-somethings unsure about the ones they have; and sixty-somethings whose empty nest causes all sorts of doubt. Visible City invites us to examine those all-important forks in the road, and the conflict between desire and loyalty.
Author
I grew up in the small Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis, Tennessee, where I felt both what was grounding about being part of a such an enclosed world as well as what was stifling. This became the subject of m first novel, The Ladies Auxiliary, which I started writing when I no longer living in Memphis. Being away from home enabled me to look back and it and explore my own ambivalence about belonging. My second novel, The Outside World, is also set in an Orthodox Jewish world, and is about two families whose children marry each other. In that book I wanted to write about the conflict between tradition and modernity, and also about marriage and dreams and belief and doubt. My third novel Visible City began when I moved from New York City to a Boston suburb. I was so homesick for a city I had come to live, and longed for the anonymous intimacy that comes from living among so many strangers. Visible City is about a woman who watches her neighbors from her windows and becomes entangled in their lives. It's a book about watching people we don't know but about the difficulty of seeing people we do know as well. It's also about a lost stained glass window and about motherhood and the loneliness of marriage. And now, after these three novels, I've written a memoir called The Book of Separation. It originated with an essay I wrote in the New York Times about leaving my marriage and my Orthodox Jewish faith. After the piece came out I was flooded with emails from people telling me their own stories of loss and change and it inspired me to write this book. The Book of Separation is about wrestling with doubt, about trying to be the person I was expected to be and about decided to change, when change felt as terrifying as anything I could do. I wrote about my experience of leaving a world where so much was scripted for me and trying to forge a new way of life that felt more genuine to me.
