City of Girls, by Elizabeth Gilbert

I was so impressed by Gilbert’s excellent novel The signature of all things, that I made the mistake of going back and reading her older, wildly popular memoir, Eat, pray, love, which I absolutely loathed.  It may have mostly been a generational thing, but, ugh, such self-involvement!  Her newest novel, City of Girls, has been widely and positively reviewed and I was looking forward to something more like Signature than Eat, pray, love.  Sadly, it was the latter.  Vivian, a 95-year-old woman, looks back on her exciting life in glamorous New York and the theater world.  When young, privileged Vivian flunks out of Vassar, she is sent to stay with her aunt, who owns a small, struggling theater, and discovers a brave new world.  Aunt Peg has a colorful history of her own and is still more or less married to charming Billy, who is a successful writer living in California.  His arrival on the scene, along with a famous British actress and her handsome, witless actor husband fleeing England having lost everything in the Blitz, leads to a “Let’s put on a play!” situation.  Billy writes City of Girls, famous actress and actor star, the theater is saved!!  And then Vivian, having discovered sex and simply not able to get enough of it, sleeps with famous actress's husband.  Theater abandoned by Billy and famous cast!   Vivian continues, for hundreds of pages and seemingly hundreds of years, to sleep with anyone and everyone without shame, compunction, or really any further consequences.  Great events happen, wars, etc., Vivian sleeps around.  Does this sound just a little familiar?  Avoid.  480 pp.