A shaggy showgirl story

One of the chief regrets of book-loving women of my age — and a surprising number of men — is that no one writes novels like Love in a Cold Climate and The Dud Avocado any more. I’m talking about the brand of romantic misadventure written with such wit, verve and emotional honesty that you feel you’ve washed down 100 life lessons within a vodka martini. Miraculously, Elizabeth Gilbert has managed to pull off exactly this feat with her high-kicking new novel City of Girls. It helps that she’s set the story in a shabby New York vaudeville theatre in the 1940s, thronging with bohemians, and everyone spouts one-liners straight out of Romcom Central.

The novel winds its way back into the past in the form of a letter to a woman called Angela, who’s written to the ageing narrator asking ‘if you might now feel comfortable telling me what you were to my father?’. The answer is far more complicated than you might expect, and much of the novel’s action takes second place to a shaggy showgirl story.

Gilbert’s preppy, spoilt heroine (‘I was always pretty, Angela. What’s more, I always knew it’) is 19-year-old Vivian Morris, who’s been booted out of Vassar for doing sweet FA. In the summer of 1940 she heads for Manhattan, where her irrepressible aunt Peg owns a down-at-heel theatre, the Lily Playhouse, and is unfailingly kind to waifs and strays. Before you can sing ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, our ingénue is ensconced in a room over the theatre, chastely sharing a bed with the chorus line’s most seductive hoofer, Celia, and making costumes for the entire cast.

Vivian’s sole skill on arrival is her pronounced talent as a seamstress (‘I never forget what anyone is wearing, ever’), although by the time the summer’s over she’s also a grade-A vamp about town.