What Finally Matters

What Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Riverhead Books.  224 pp.  $19.59. *****

The idea sounds grim beyond belief.  Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer.  At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, and she decides she would rather take her own life than be at the mercy of the disease.  She has to do the task herself, but doesn’t want to be alone.  She has asked two close friends to help, but both said they couldn’t.  So finally she asks our narrator, who consents.  That is the basic situation in What Are You Going Through.  They will travel to an Airbnb, rented for a month, and sometime during that month the cancer patient will take some pills.

The title comes from a quotation by Simone Weil.  “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”

There are certain writers you’d read on almost any subject, or even no subject at all, and I’m beginning to think that Sigrid Nunez—though I’ve read just two of her novels—is one of them.  The agreement to be a companion on this suicide mission doesn’t happen until well into the novel, and until then she visits her friend and talks with her, but also continues her daily life.  She’s an older woman, so the subjects on her mind, of aging, mortality, the way women are treated in general and especially as they age, also the current situation on the planet and the dreadful politics of our country, are the same things we’re all thinking of.  Sickness, aging, and death are the focus of the Buddhist practice that I’ve done for thirty years.  I don’t know of a book that faces them more clearly than this one.

It’s also funny.  Sometimes hilariously funny.

The book opens as our narrator—in town to visit her friend—attends a lecture by a well-known intellectual.  His message is that the coming extinction of the human race, and the end of the world as we know it, is completely inevitable; there’s nothing we can do about it.  This man had been a critic of arts and culture, but has given it all up to deliver this relentless message, which he also spelled out in a prominent article that everyone has read.  He delivers his lecture to a half-full auditorium, and refuses to take questions, so the attendees walk out carrying this dreadful message.  The general reaction is: what the hell am I supposed to do with this?  Have a drink, is the consensus of opinion.

Nunez has written a memoir about Susan Sontag, and there’s some temptation to see Sontag as the sick friend here, but that would be a mistake; the biographies don’t add up, and this woman isn’t the withering intellectual Sontag was (though she’s withering enough).  Also, she has a daughter—as Sontag did not—with whom she doesn’t get along.  The young woman was raised to be tolerant and kind, but all her life has been anything but that, at least with her mother.  There’s no chance of reconciliation, and the mother doesn’t even try.  Her life will end without a peaceful moment with her daughter.

You do a lot of laughing with this book.  I believe that’s called gallows humor.  But it’s also the joy of being in the presence of a narrator who writes beautifully and cleanly, sees life clearly, doesn’t have a religious or spiritual tradition to fall back on it—except just the fact of being human, and facing what we all face—but still sees a certain delight in everything.  The world is brightly lit.

In some way that I can’t quite name, only a woman could have written this book.  It isn’t just that it is a woman’s sensibility who is seeing everything, or that we’re in the presence of two alert intelligent woman facing the central issues of life.[1]  And it isn’t as if these woman haven’t had careers; both have apparently done well in the academic and intellectual and publishing worlds they’ve inhabited.  But there’s some understanding—in a way that no man ever gets—that those things don’t essentially matter.  The man who’s making a living and has become a minor celebrity talking about the end of the world is right, but he’s also a moron.  What matters is something more basic: taking care of each other in the face of a coming disaster.  Living our lives as they’re given to us.

I have to admit that my inmost prejudice is opposed to euthanasia.  I hope I would not take my own life but would—as I once heard a Zen teacher put it—live out my karma, and I’m not sure I could assist anyone else, even by being just there.  This book’s fundamental situation made me profoundly uncomfortable, and I didn’t see how Nunez could end it successfully.  That she somehow did, in a way that is perfect emotionally and also in terms of the plot, is a tribute to her skill as a writer.  I was completely satisfied, but not let off the hook.

One time a Zen teacher named Gudo Nishijima was asked how to comfort a woman who was dying of cancer.  One thing he said was that she should experience her pain—both physical and emotional—as it arose.  But the other thing was kind of stunning.  “It may seem cruel,” he said.  “But tell her she is alive now.  Remind her she is alive now.”

That’s the feeling I had as I read the book.  These women are in a hopeless situation.  In a certain sense—according to that knucklehead intellectual—we all are.  But we’re alive now, and can’t lose sight of that.  We’re alive now.

[1] My wife thinks it’s wrong to call it a woman’s novel.  She would call it a relational novel.  I’ve never heard that term, but I agree.  I think we’re saying the same thing.