Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature: A Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms by Alice Levick (review)

Reviewed by: Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature: A Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms by Alice Levick Vladimir Rizov Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature: A Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms. By Alice Levick. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2021. vii+226 pp. £85. ISBN 978–1–350–18457–2. In keeping with the subtitle of Memory and the Built Environment, which promises a 'Reading and Analysis of Spatial Forms', Alice Levick seeks to elucidate the various ways in which space and narrative intersect in twentieth-century American literature. The analysis is a rich and insightful study of Los Angeles and New York City. From the very start, the book eloquently captures the significance of space to personal and lived experience. Memory and the Built Environment sets its starting point in the spatial manifestation of the uncanny (drawing on Anthony Vidler's work on the uncanny as much as on Siegmund Freud's original formulation). Levick's writing evocatively introduces and concludes the book with a personal vignette about the experience of home, thereby highlighting the significance of the built environment to a person's life. In between the framing personal reflection, Levick covers four concepts in a chapter each. Chapter 1 focuses on the interplay between the garden and the grid by focusing on the works of D. J. Waldie and Raymond Chandler. In both cases, the garden and the grid are understood as both manifestations of social projects of control over the natural environment and the individual making sense of their circumstances. Levick articulates the similarities between D. J. Waldie's experience of the LA suburb and Chandler's representations of private spaces. Chapter 2 is concerned with the concept of 'the imago city', which allows Levick to engage with the uncertainty of memory in Joan Didion, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Alison Lurie. In all three authors, Levick analyses the focus on movement—from Didion's driving to Yamamoto's experiences of racialization on a bus journey to Lurie's protagonist and her experiences of a decontextualized LA—where there are no seasons and no chronology of architectural style. For Levick, Yamamoto's and Lurie's LA and Didion's Sacramento are especially indicative of the image of California as frontier, as a space that both allows for reinvention and enforces it, thereby continuously repressing its history. Chapter 3 draws on the work of Marshall Berman and uses the notion of the suture to examine the effects of Robert Moses's work in the Bronx. Notably, Levick's engagement with the topic is informed by the time she spent in the New York Public Library working with the Robert Moses collection as well as interviews and personal histories of residents of Brooklyn, some of whom are literary figures. Chapter 4 focuses on the works of Paula Fox and L. J. Davis through the lens of the palimpsest. The continuity with the theme of the obliteration of space in the discussion of Berman and Moses here is expressed in the search for authenticity and the contrast of interior and external space. Levick makes an interesting argument that engages with the centrality of authenticity to gentrification and its links to the notion of the pioneer. By doing so, she evocatively draws a continuity between settler colonialism, discussed in relation to Didion's focus on the frontier, and gentrification. Authenticity, as Levick points out, is to do End Page 413 with appearance, the façade, and preservation as much as it is to do with spectacle and an imagined view of what is being maintained. One notable strength of Levick's method is the expansiveness of her multistoried monograph, both in terms of engagement with literary works in the twentieth century and in the scope of its theoretical and historical commitment. Each chapter is intricately built on in-depth readings while the monograph's structure allows for a deepening of engagement with each new concept introduced. In addition to the literary and spatial, Levick regularly stresses the social dimensions of the processes of suburbanization, slum clearance, gentrification, and architecture. Vladimir Rizov University of Sussex Copyright © 2024 The Modern Humanities Research Association