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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.
Reviews
“Read Visible City. Tova Mirvis’s graceful yet vigorous New York novel is about the half-inadvertent window-peeping that city life enables, and where it can lead.”
—New York Magazine
“Mirvis’s meticulously choreographed novel surprises and moves us. She shows the city for what it is behind all its windows and walls: a vast constellation of those “truthful moments” her heroine seeks, as numerous as the stars.”
—Julia Glass, The New York Times Book Review
“A complex novel about intersecting lives... A wry, funny portrait of an Upper West Side in turmoil.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“In a glittering novel about fate, fantasy, and the anonymity of urban life, a lonely New York City woman uses her son’s toy binoculars to spy on couples whose intimacy she craves."
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“As the novel moves from one character’s point of view to another, empathy becomes its narrative fuel. ...The finest accomplishment of Visible City lies in the fact that, though its tone remains hopeful, the novel offers no clear-cut answers or suggestion of finality. Mirvis’s graceful language, surprising turns of understanding, and gentle brushstrokes of fantasy make it tempting to believe that her characters live on past the novel’s luminous final chapter."
“Dark, witty.... a moving examination of intimacy's limitations.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"A radiant vision of her character's a newly discovered liberation and of the infinitely complex, extraordinary city in which that kind of reinvention can come to feel like a possibility every day."
"Tova Mirvis won me over with her empathy with her characters, whose inner lives she probes with subtle insight and style in ‘Visible City’…achingly well told."
—Minneapolis StarTribune
"Such is Mirvis's finesse and insight that she leaves the reader completely sympathetic with each character's dilemmas.....Visible City is a beautifully rendered novel that takes on art, parenting, betrayal and the nature of love."
“The charming new novel by best-selling writer Tova Mirvis.... As the lives of Mirvis’ three couples become increasingly intertwined, readers’ curiosity will be piqued, just as Nina’s was when these neighbors were merely strangers.”
“As connections form between characters…. looking into the lives of others helps them move toward watersheds in their own lives. In a departure from her earlier faith-based novels, Mirvis focuses her artful prose on the inner lives of modern women and those they love as they face the possibilities of change.”
—Booklist
“Mirvis writes an intimate story about different types of relationships, including those with complete strangers… In this story of chance and the temptation of change, Mirvis elicits the reader’s sympathy for her characters’ conflicting desires.”
—Publishers weekly
“Visible City is a beautifully-written and poignant novel. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy literary fiction with strong interesting characters. Set in a New York City neighborhood, Mirvis masterfully weaves the lives of her characters together through random encounters and circumstances.”
"an utterly perfect, deeply moving evocation of contemporary Manhattan, which reminded me of Paula Fox and Laurie Colwin, and also those master chroniclers of the privileged classes, Wharton and Fitzgerald. Mirvis writes with a rare combination of urgency, elegance, and humor—sentences so gorgeous and refined they don’t call attention to themselves—unabashedly probing her characters’ psychological and emotional depths, all the while examining the larger social, economic, and cultural forces at play in their lives. Brilliant.”
Joanna Rakoff, Salon
“With artful tenderness and elegant compassion, Tova Mirvis strips her upscale Manhattanites down to their naked loneliness and longings. Her novel is as jewel-like as the stained glass window by La Farge that some of her characters believe may be hidden out of sight, walled-up inside an apartment building and waiting for the light of day for all its beauty to shine forth. Mirvis supplies the light, and the result is dazzling.”
—Rebecca Goldstein, MacArthur Award-winning authorof 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
“A fascinating maze of a novel, following the intersecting lives of two New York families as they come together and fall apart. Gorgeously written and enormously wise on the subjects of art, ambition, parenting, betrayal, and what it means to take care of the ones you love.”
—Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family
“Here the hidden is made stunningly visible. One by one, facades are stripped away and the luminous interiors of strangers’ lives begin to emerge: in the view-field of a sleepless woman’s binoculars, in the flashlight beams of subterranean urban explorers, in the radiance filtering through a long-lost stained glass window, and, always, in the light of Tova Mirvis’ kaleidoscopic, tender vision. Visible City illuminates the hearts of both its characters and its readers.”
—Rachel Kadish, author of Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story
“Visible City reminds us how strangers become intimates and intimates grow estranged. Tova Mirvis writes with passion and unflinching honesty about the small grievances that accumulate until we no longer know the people we love.”
—Josh Henkin, author of The World Without You