Urban Renewal : APPROACHING EYE LEVEL.<i> By Vivian Gornick (Beacon Press: $18, 176 pp.)</i>

Seven provocative autobiographical essays make up “Approaching Eye Level,” Vivian Gornick’s latest book, which centers on living alone and the search for intellectual community. These subjects come alive as Gornick both individualizes and generalizes her struggle to live independently and to write. It is her particular genius to make readers feel what they are thinking; indeed, Gornick has long had an extraordinary ability to make ideas flesh and blood, from her first book, “The Romance of American Communism,” through “Fierce Attachments,” the passionate and critically acclaimed memoir of her life with her mother.

“Approaching Eye Level” begins where her memoir left off, on the streets of New York. She’s not walking with her widowed mother now; she’s living alone in the city that gives her a sense of self and her own life. At other times, what she calls “New York loneliness” makes her feel separated from the feast of life, “a fool and a loser.” After a day of her own hard work, or a day of solitary confusion and uncertainty, Gornick has only to leave her apartment and hit the pavement to see “how often the street achieves composition for me: the flash of experience I extract again and again from the endless stream of event. The street does for me what I cannot do for myself. On the street nobody watches, everyone performs.”

A walk to the hardware store to replace a washer from her faucet becomes a metaphysical moment-cum-vaude-ville act with one of “the tough old Jewish guys behind the counter, an oracle who replaces plastic with metal, not without philosophical flourish.” Gornick thanks him for having fixed her faucet, for correcting this small anxiety and freeing her for “large anxieties.” He shifts his cigar and replies: “What you just said. That’s a true thing.”

Gornick finds living alone now more difficult than she did after her divorce, a time when solitude was seen as a gift. In “What Feminism Means to Me,” Gornick recounts those heady days of the early ‘70s when, on assignment for the Village Voice, she stumbled onto the burgeoning women’s movement and clarified her goals. For the first time she saw her own dilemma within a historic context: “The lifelong inability to take myself seriously as a worker; this was the central dilemma of a woman’s existence.”

Caught up in the embrace of revolutionary politics, in a community of committed and intelligent women, Gornick found a “bliss” she thought would last a lifetime, something more important than romantic love. “The only important thing, I told myself, was work.” Feminism gave her the ability to look hard truth straight in the eye--or as much hard truth as she could take in.

“The Catskills Remembered” is a stunning example of this. Re-creating her days as a college student who was a waitress in the Borscht Belt in the late ‘50s, Gornick portrays the narcotic of absolute power as well as the pervasiveness of human cruelty and isolation. The daydream of this working-class girl from the Bronx--who has to treat paying guests like royalty--is not about boys, sex or revenge. Instead, in the heavy buzz of a summer day, she fancies herself “under a great shade tree of a kind we didn’t have in the mountains. Beside me, on the grass, sat a group of strangers--graceful, beautiful, intelligent--animated by clever talk and sophisticated laughter.”

Gornick continues in her adult life to pursue this daydream--the yearning for a golden age of pure expressiveness and illuminating conversation. She searches for expressiveness in a time and in a society where letters are no longer written and when most people are so busy that cordiality is reduced to a smile, a handshake and a “we must get together” when acquaintances meet.

In “At the University,” Gornick blends wit and anger to portray the isolation she felt as a visiting professor. Shouldn’t there be great conversation at institutions dedicated to the life of the mind, she wonders? But she often appears either blind or resistant to the fact that the life of the mind takes place in people who have feelings. Her expressiveness is sometimes perceived as violent criticism. “You think you’re only speaking your mind,” one woman says, “but you’re like the foreigner who takes you into his confidence while he trashes your country.”

Gornick’s country is the streets of New York, filled with people day and night who are trying out their own lives. They provide an artistic consolation for Gornick, who considers herself one of a growing group of people between 35 and 55 who are, despite earlier intentions, living alone. “We are all the formerly married, are we not?” she writes.

Perhaps because she is a born ideologue who thrives on having a opinion, Gornick has made living alone, the necessary consequence of being divorced, a test of character. She seems to have steeled herself to a solitary existence. In “On Living Alone,” the penultimate essay, Gornick describes this state and the relief she felt in having had a roommate while living in the South: “I wasn’t with a lover or even with an intimate friend. I was simply sharing a house with a compatible person. I had the pleasure of coffee in the morning and a chat in the evening with a woman I enjoyed talking with and the comfort of knowing we spent the night under the same roof.” But living with a roommate is a fleeting moment in her journey.

In one essay, a teacher of writing switches from pomposity to vision: “Good writing has two characteristics: It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.” These are the qualities that make “Approaching Eye Level” so brilliant, compelling and cohesive. Gornick tells us: “I have endured the loss of three salvation romances--the idea of love, the idea of community, the idea of work.”

Where will she go next? Her readers await.