The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
“An otherwise unreachable experience of reality.” Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times THE LONELY CITY Adventures in the Art of Being Alone By Olivia Laing Illustrated. 315 pp. Picador. $26. The Book of Common Prayer offers an intercession for “our families, friends and neighbors, and for those who are alone.” We tend to put the alone in this separate category, but for Olivia Laing, “the essential unknowability of others” means that to be human is to be lonesome, at least sometimes. So why don’t we talk about it more openly? “What’s so shameful,” she asks, about “having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?” This daring and seductive book — ostensibly about four artists, but actually about the universal struggle to be known — raises sophisticated questions about the experience of loneliness, a state that in a crowded city provides an “uneasy combination of separation and exposure.” “The Lonely City,” like Laing’s previous books — “The Trip to Ec