Clearing the Decks

A Feather on the Breath of God a novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Picador.  192 pp.  $14.39 ****

One puzzle about Sigrid Nunez is why this excellent writer didn’t publish her first book until she was 44 years old.  She was writing from the time she was in college; we know that from Sempre Susan, in which she’s immersed in literary life in her mid-twenties, taking jobs at magazines, going to Breadloaf.  But A Feather on the Breath of God is her first major publication.

It seems the most autobiographical of her books, a strange thing to say about someone whose whole oeuvre seems to come from her life.  But this book hardly seems to be a novel at all, and looks like a methodical attempt at self-examination.  It consists of four sections: Chang, about her father; Christa, about her mother; A Feather on the Breath of God, about a youthful infatuation with ballet; and Immigrant Love, about a love affair she had as a young woman.  I hope I’m not wrong to see this as blatant autobiography—at least the early sections—though she published it as a novel.  She uses the real names.

Her background is unusual, to say the least.  Her father was a Chinese man named Carlos Chang, sired by a man who had a business in Panama.  He apparently had a wife and two sons in China and a wife and two sons in Panama.  He took Carlos back to China for ten years when he was a child, then returned him to Panama, where he must have felt horribly out of place.  His Uncle Mee—his father’s brother—took him to New York, where he lived in Chinatown and eventually became a US citizen.  Somewhere in that process he adopted his mother’s name and became Carlos Nunez, perhaps because it was customary in Latin countries to take the mother’s name, and his brother had done it.  He was drafted into the army and fought in the Second World War.  Stationed in a small town in Germany after the fighting was over, he became lovers with a young woman named Christa.  He was thirty-two, she just eighteen.  She’d had a child with him and gotten pregnant with a second before he was discharged and they moved back to the states.

He’d led a profligate life up to then, a lot of drinking and gambling, but took an apartment in a housing project and tried to settle down.  Christa found to her dismay that she was pregnant for a third time, and tried to have an abortion, but it didn’t work out.  This third child was our narrator, whom I think of as Sigrid, though I don’t believe she names herself.[1]

I’ve read portraits of dreadful marriages, but seldom one as bleak as this.  Who knows what brought them together in Germany (what language did they speak?), but by the time they got to New York she was already miserable.  He was taciturn anyway, a man’s man, but also never learned English well.  He worked long hours at a series of blue collar jobs, never made much money.  He’d come home for a late dinner, drink a quart of beer, and go out early the next morning.  He cared for his daughters but was isolated in this female English-speaking family.

His wife complained about everything, the projects where they lived, the little money he made, her life in this country in general.  At one point she went back to Germany, taking her three daughters when Sigrid was just two, but that didn’t work out somehow and she returned to life with her husband.  She seemed deeply unhappy, and her relationship with her daughters bordered on abuse.  But she was articulate and had books around.  If Sigrid got her writing gene from anyone, it was her mother.

First, however, she became obsessed with ballet.  She was completely devoted, ate almost nothing so she could have the slender figure of a ballerina.  This book’s title is an expression for the way a ballerina should look at her best.  She realized eventually that she might not have had the talent or body of a first-class ballerina—she also, weirdly, started too late; most great ballerinas began early in childhood—but she learned discipline from ballet, and may have taken it into her writing.  Back when I taught secondary school, I always thought that, if a young person had a strong interest in something, anything, they’d be able to pull themselves through adolescence.  If ballet did nothing else for Sigrid, it got her through that period of her life, and got her out of the house.  Anything that separated her from her mother was good.

In a way, though they tell the story of a whole period of her life, those three sections are just a prelude to the fourth, which details a love affair she had in her early twenties with a Russian immigrant, a man she had been teaching in an English class for immigrants.  She knew people who pictured an ideal future with a husband and wife and a couple of kids, a house with a white picket fence, but she—because of her background—had a different ideal, a single room with a bed and desk where she could do the work she wanted to.  She was happy to welcome a lover to that bed, but didn’t want someone living there.  She wanted to devote herself to writing, wasn’t looking for a life partner.

It’s funny how, in a way, she duplicates her parents’ experience.  She doesn’t know this man well; he’s just older and somehow attractive.  He—as soon as he began taking the class—resolved to have sex with his teacher.  He was married and had a daughter, for a time had other family members living with him.  He’d had a difficult life, had trouble finding and keeping work, but eventually drove a taxi and came to see Sigrid on days when he had some free time.  Her friends couldn’t understand what she was doing.  He seemed rough around the edges and vaguely threatening, carried a gun in his taxi, but with Sigrid he was tender and completely present, full of terms of endearment (which he’d learned in her class).  There was no future to the relationship.

But that was what she wanted.  That’s what her friends didn’t understand.

I understand why this was Sigrid Nunez’ first book.  She had to take in her own life before she could move on.  I’m not sure why it took so long.  But she’s been prolific since.

[1] A characteristic of her work.  In her two most recent novels nobody has a name.