Gornick’s new book is part memoiristic collage, part literary criticism, yet it is also an urgent argument that rereading offers the opportunity not just to correct and adjust one’s recollection of a book but to correct and adjust one’s perception of oneself.

... a chronicle of the protean perceptions and interpretations drawn from among the books that have, for one reason or another, stayed with Gornick through the passage of decades. Unfinished Business does not present as a work of literary criticism per se. While it is concerned with interpretation and meaning, its fundamental focus is on that most peculiar of phenomena, the way that texts appear to change as we reread them throughout our lives.

...[an] enchanting and addictive little book—whose size and shape make it feel like it contains epigrams and instructions for life when in fact it contains not so much instructions for life, but life itself.

Chronic rereaders of the author’s essays, criticism, biographies, and memoirs will recognize in her spare and elegant new book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, a familiar commitment to class consciousness, cultural politics, gender, and close reading — not only of literature, but of daily human relationships.

Gornick recognizes that in that initial encounter, one might not be emotionally ready to appreciate a work fully, but with each rereading will recognize a new literary element or better understand a particular protagonist no matter how many times the book has been perused before.

This is not a guide for how to be. The books that draw her are madeleines, summoning the self she was at previous readings. Criticism in Gornick’s hands is a sneaky form of autobiography—a series of love letters to moments she was jolted into consciousness. Sneaky and enlivening because the narrator looks out at something other than itself, and in that looking reveals a self to the reader.

Gornick acknowledges that she has written about and quoted from several authors in this book before; they have been her literary companions at successive stages in her adult life. They comprise a group that is as idiosyncratic as Gornick’s perspective.

Though occasionally too close to her own readings in a way that risks alienating readers, at her best, Gornick gets the balance right, drawing on her own life without reducing literature to a therapeutic tool.

... literary cognoscente will appreciate Vivian Gornick’s brilliance as a literary critic and her erudite, mature analysis. Others may find that analysis challenging if not inaccessible, especially if they are not familiar with the writers about whom Gornick writes. Nonetheless, for readers of good and important literature, this short book can be savored.

With its concentric rings of self-scrutiny, Unfinished Business shows that Gornick’s commitment to altering consciousness—above all, her own—has only intensified with time.

Part memoir, part feminist literary analysis and wholly engaging.

Gornick’s ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.

... brief and characteristically pithy.