Book Review Article: Sigrid Nunez, WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH

 

U.R. Bowie

Book Review Article

Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through (Riverbend Books [Penguin Random House], 2020), 210 pp.

Fake and Genuine Solicitude

Note that there is no question mark in the title, although the epigraph to Part One, taken from Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies, with a View to the Love of God,” has it:

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” Only half way through the book do we learn that Simone Weil asked the question in her native French: Quel est ton tourment?

The lack of the question mark in the title, perhaps, suggests a different (better?) title: What You (We) Are Going Through, for that is really the subject matter of this fiction, and the subject matter of countless other fictions written all over the world and in all historical times. Something else suggested by the missing question mark: that when we people say these words we are not exactly asking a genuine question, since most of the time we do not expect, and would not welcome a detailed answer. It’s something like saying, How are you? which, at least in American English has become nothing more than an empty phrase. Few are the persons who expect a detailed answer: “Oh dear, let me tell you all about it.” And few are the persons who would welcome a detailed account of your woes.

Then again, What are you going through? is not a question that, in fact, anybody ever asks anybody else, at least not in those exact words. People being truly solicitous, when seeing a friend in distress, will say, “Are you all right?” Or “What can I do to help you?” Nunez’s main point, perhaps, is that there are few of us these days who are genuinely caring. When the narrator blurts out to the trainer at the gym that she has a friend who is dying, his immediate reaction is, “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“Said it reflexively, as people always do, this formula that nobody really wants to hear, that comforts nobody. But it was not his fault that our language has been hollowed out, coarsened, and bled dry, leaving us always stupid and tongue-tied before emotion.”

Later, during the same interaction, the trainer says to the narrator, “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.” This sounds more genuinely solicitous, although even here we may have more fake caring than genuine caring; after all, the trainer barely knows the narrator and has never even met her dying friend. Late in the novel her ex-husband says, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” and that sounds genuine. But near the end of the novel the ex turns on her when she expresses her reluctance to be a silent participant in what is a suicide pact.

Once again, the main point may be that much of the caring we express is not that genuine, and the words that we use to express it give us away. Quite frequently we react to another person’s distress with statements such as, “Let me know if there is anything I can do.” This is another piece of fakery, a “formula that nobody wants to hear.” A person who utters such a sentence may be genuinely surprised, taken aback, if you phone her and say, “Yes, there is something you can do for me.”

The End of the Human Race

On the first page of the book we learn when the action is set: September, 2017. Here is the first line of the book: “I went to hear a man give a talk.” Only later do we learn that this man is the narrator’s ex-husband. On the poster advertising his appearance there is a photograph that prepares us for the man and the talk. He has “the look that comes to many older white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze. Like raptors. Hardly inviting. Hardly an image to say, Please, do come hear me speak. Would love to see you there! More like, Make no mistake, I know a lot more than you do. You should listen to me. Maybe then you’ll know what’s what.

The subject of the talk: “Bye-bye, folks. It’s all over for Homo sapiens.”

“It was all over, he said. He quoted another writer, translating from the French: Before man, the forest; after him, the desert. Whatever must be done to forestall catastrophe, whatever actions or sacrifices, it was now clear that humankind lacked the will, the collective will, to undertake them. To any intelligent alien, he said, we would appear to be in the grip of a death wish.”

The grim message: it’s too late to do anything now, “our world and our civilization would not endure.” “We, our own worst enemy, had set ourselves up like sitting ducks, allowing weapons capable of killing us all many times over not only to be created but also to land in the hands of egomaniacs, nihilists, men without empathy, without conscience.” No matter what we do now we “will still be faced with the perils that generations of human stupidity, shortsightedness, and capacity for self-delusion have produced.”

Climate change denial. When “the most powerful nation in the world . . . swaggered to the very forefront of denial, what hope did Planet Earth have. To think that the masses of refugees fleeing shortages of food and clean water caused by global ecological disaster would find compassion anywhere their desperation drove them was absurd, the man said. On the contrary, we would soon see man’s inhumanity to man on a scale like nothing that had ever been seen before.”

“Cyberterrorism. Bioterrorism. The inevitable next great flu pandemic, for which we were, just as inevitably, unprepared. Incurable killer infections borne of our indiscriminate use of antibiotics. The rise of far-right regimes around the world. The normalization of propaganda and deceit as political strategy and basis for government policy. The inability to defeat global jihadism. Threats to life and liberty—to anything worthy of the name civilization—were flourishing, the man said. In short supply, on the other hand, were the means to combat them.”

“Again, how had a supposedly freedom-loving people allowed this to happen? Why were people not outraged by the very idea of surveillance capitalism? Scared right out of their wits by Big Tech? An alien one day studying our collapse might well conclude: Freedom was too much for them. They would rather be slaves.” On this last point see, e.g., Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century, who covered this business thoroughly (Notes from the Underground). It’s not as if all the revelations about hapless humanity presented in the Nunez novel are exactly new.

“How sad, he said, to see so many of the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment . . . equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.)”

The time has come to stop having children. “Perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place.” The perhaps here has no real place in this man’s lecture; for him there is no perhaps about it.

I’ve quoted by far not all of this speech, which takes up ten pages of text and makes a convincing argument that the human race is doomed to extinction in the not-distant future. The action of the novel is set in 2017, early on in the Trumpian Era, but, given the man’s re-election and his present efforts to transform our country into a right-wing dictatorship, the malaise that hangs over the U.S.A. in the year 2025 is much more pronounced than it was just eight years ago.

One blurber writes that “it takes something more than intelligence to be able to write intelligently. . . . Whatever it is, Sigrid Nunez has it.” One thing SN has is a flair for sticking in little bits of humor throughout her fictional works, which treat, sometimes, the darkest of subjects. Among those departing the room after the lecture is a man mocking the hopelessness of the message by imitating Roy Orbison, singing “It’s Over.” Another man walks away whistling the supremely optimistic, if trite, song, “My Favorite Things” (“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens”). When the man who gave the lecture (the narrator’s ex) shows up again late in the book, he is presented as a sad and somewhat comic creature. Nothing that once appealed to him throughout his life—art and culture—has the least appeal anymore. He is convinced that “great art is a thing of the past.” “The last creative artist on a level with, say, Mozart or Shakespeare was George Balanchine, who was born in 1904.” Interesting idea; could it be true? I doubt it. What I suspect is that there are plenty of creative geniuses out there still today. But nobody pays any attention to them. In other words, modern man is mired is such triviality and banality that he is incapable of looking at the creativity all around him.

The unnamed ex (Nunez has a fondness for not naming her characters) takes a grim satisfaction in spreading his message of Doomsday, although there seems little point in his going around making speeches about humanity’s fecklessness. Now he is universally hated and gets frequent death threats. “A lot of friends have dropped me. My own son is barely speaking to me because I didn’t hide how appalled I was that his wife is expecting their third child. Doesn’t want me anywhere near her. Says I’m enough to scare her into a miscarriage.” Ha.

Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia

The main plotline of the novel features a female friend of the narrator, like her, a writer (journalist), who is afflicted with cancer. This woman has few close relatives. Her only daughter is “unnatural,” having expressed blatant hostility toward her mother for the whole of their lives. Many are the parents, it seems, afflicted with a child who has a trait like “illness or disability, lack of affection, bad behavior.” Of all the persons in the book described as “going through” one or another distressing situation, this friend with cancer has the worst “going through” to face.

Like the ex-husband convinced of humanity’s incorrigibility and imminent demise, the friend with cancer finds little solace in anything that once enthralled her. Once a good writer, she has no interest in writing anything now: “I’m done with languaging. I’m sick of writing, sick of word searching.” She notes that great writers seem much less impressive when you reread them late in life, and totally beside the point when you read them while dying of cancer. She is annoyed by pop songs that sound all the same and, inevitably, contain nothing but inane lyrics.

The woman with cancer has a plan. She has obtained the pills necessary to do herself in, declaring that “cancer can’t get me if I get me first.” Halfway through the book she tells the narrator, “I will not go out in mortifying anguish.” The big surprise of the narrative will be that at this point she has one hundred pages of text in which to die and never does. Of course, if she went ahead and took the pills there would be no story to be told and no book for us to read.

The story that we are told involves this woman’s asking her friend, the narrator, to help her die. “What I need is someone to be there with me,” she says. Two of her better friends have already declined to take up this duty. “You were not my first choice,” she tells the narrator. The trick of this whole business—a trick that allows for a hundred pages of the story to be told—involves the woman’s decision that she will not tell her helper exactly when she plans on taking the pills. The helper will be with her as companion of her waning days, but will not be informed when the big act is about to occur. The act, though expected, will come as a surprise, a shock. How much this is similar to the quotidian workings of death. We know someone is severely ill, we know that someone is moribund, but when she/he dies we, nonetheless, gasp at the news: Oh, no! I can’t believe it!

The dying woman—so obsessed with herself—never stops to think how selfish she is acting, in asking someone to help her die under such circumstances. At this point the story becomes that of “two different adventures,” that of the dying woman and that of the friend helping her die. By the end of the book the narrative is perhaps less about the dying woman and her prospective euthanasia and more about the agonizing position in which she has placed her friend. Only very late in the novel (p. 173) does the truth finally dawn on the dying woman: “I’ve been so selfish, I never thought about you.”

The woman with terminal cancer takes her friend with her to a sylvan environment, an Airbnb in a coastal town. There the two go about “doing euthanasia” together, or, rather, not doing it. The grim ex-husband later describes their misadventures as “Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.” The first big setback comes when the cancer patient realizes that she has forgotten to bring the pills with her. She chalks this up to “Chemo brain,” but we suspect a Freudian slip, the workings of some neuron deep in her brain—protesting against what she plans to do.

As the two women spend their time together on the brink of eternity they grow ever closer to each other. They become, in fact, almost like lovers. I find myself wondering if this part of the plot is believable. Much more likely—a plotline that is actually suggested—is that the woman asked to shepherd the cancer patient for an indefinite time would crack under the pressure. Would, in fact, grow resentful at being placed in such a stressful position. At any rate, the story concludes with the would-be suicide still not dead and the helper in a state of nervous collapse. The “going through” story becomes, largely, that not of the woman going through cancer but that of the friend recruited to help her die.

d

Sigrid Nunez is a fine writer, and the book teems with lovely writing. Lots of scenes involve secondary characters, who make brief appearances and never show up again. This reminds me somewhat of films by the Coen Brothers, in which some of the best scenes involve characters with just that one scene in the movie. I like the parts describing the Airbnb hostess with the dead cat, and, later in the story, the part where the cat tells his tale. Another nice little interlude describes a woman at the fitness center who loves reading Infinite Jest because, so she says, she’ll get her money’s worth out of the time spent reading such a long and complex novel. Later on, reminded that when she and the narrator first spoke to one another she was reading Infinite Jest, she denies ever having read the book; she has forgotten that she ever possessed a copy. After all, she tells the narrator, who has the time to read such dense and challenging literature? This same woman has lost her youthful good looks as she ages into middle age. Her departure from her once beauteous self has become the great personal tragedy of her life—what she is going through. Nobody looks up anymore when she walks by.

Nunez has a wonderful feel for the hypocrisies of academia. Here is her description of her ex-husband’s appearance as lecturer in a university setting.

“A woman introduces him. The head of the department that has invited him to speak. She is a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp. Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well-educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she’s past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair (I once heard a salon colorist say, I believe it’s got to hurt a woman’s ability to think if she has gray hair), everything says: I’m still fuckable. A slimness that almost certainly means going much of each day feeling hungry. It crosses such women’s minds with some sad regularity that in France intellectuals can be sex-symbols . . .

“I can see them, this man and this woman, at the department dinner that will surely follow the event, and which, because of who he is, will be a fine one, at one of the area’s most expensive restaurants, and where it’s likely they’ll be seated next to each other. And of course the woman will be hoping for some intense conversation—no small talk—maybe even a bit of flirtation, but this will turn out to be not so easy given how his attention keeps straying to the far end of the table, to the grad student who’s been assigned as his escort, responsible for shuttling him from place to place, including after tonight’s dinner back to his hotel, and who, after just one glass of wine, is responding to his frequent glances with increasingly bold ones of her own.”

In reconsidering that familiar scene I cannot help thinking that no, neither the “glam academic” nor the grad student—despite the usual physical attraction to fame and notoriety—will have any interest in sleeping with this morose buzzard of a man disseminating his grim message. The glam academic may be still “fuckable,” but this man has pontificated his dreary way out of any possible “fuckability.” His message of “it’s all over” has made him into an “incel.”

Nunez has not only the intelligence demanded of a good creative writer, but also the ability to look unflinchingly at all aspects of human life—the sharp keen edge to her literary pen that enables her to slice unmercifully without compunction. The passage about the woman “still fuckable” is a good example. Here is another. She imagines a woman’s imaging herself, at some point, “in due time, settling down with the One.” Note the perfect (almost painfully accurate) description of the generic old man toddling through his dotage.

“But long before this could happen, now and then when she happened to see a certain type of couple—an elderly woman accompanied by some geezer with rounded shoulders and sparse white flyaway hair, his belt riding high on his ribs [belted in above the obligatory pot belly]—she would feel a sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off day.”

The most poignant part of this whole long description turns out to be that the ideal old man who is to be the companion of this woman’s elderly years never does materialize. Like so many other women, and men, she is fated to spend her last years in loneliness. “We’re asked to accept the unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.” Those are the rules of the game, for those who venture into life in flesh. Why, God?