She Never Mellowed

The Last of Her Kind a novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  375 pp.  $25.00.

In one of her novels—I think it was What Are You Going Through—Sigrid Nunez quoted the famous first line of The Good Soldier, though I don’t think she identified the book by name: “This is the saddest story I ever heard.”  I don’t know about the very saddest, but The Last of Her Kind is one sad story.  I felt crestfallen when I finished it.

I’ve been speaking of Nunez all along as an autobiographical novelist, and I would now like to at least modify that statement, if not take it back.  Both The Friend and What Are You Going Through are so convincing as first-person narrations, and so like memoirs in their form, that I was convinced that some version of them must have happened, as unlikely as their plots are.  A Feather on the Breath of God was clearly autobiographical.  But in The Last of Her Kind, though the book reflects aspects of Nunez’ life—her narrator, Georgette George, was born in 1951, and attended Barnard—there are clearly places where she deviates from her own story, both in the background detail and the fact that Georgette marries twice, and has children (Nunez has never married).  What Nunez says herself—in videos on her website—is that she begins a novel with some situation that intrigues her and just lets it unfold.  She doesn’t plan at all.  I agree that that is the best way to write a novel, and it’s produced some brilliant results.  The Last of Her Kind is another winner.

It is a Sixties novel (though it commences as that decade comes to an end), and for someone who lived through that turbulent time is an experience of time travel: it all comes back with a rush.  George’s roommate at Barnard is Ann Drayton, a brilliant accomplished woman who comes from a wealthy family, but who not only requested a roommate from a disadvantaged background, and got one; she was actually hoping for a black roommate.  This was a woman who would later have an African American husband, and would kill a policeman in an attempt to save his life (I would issue a spoiler alert, but that fact is on the jacket copy.  It’s the central fact of the narrative).  Drayton is a familiar character from the Roaring Sixties, a radical from a wealthy family.  Not as wealthy as the Hearst family, but Ann Drayton is like Patty Hearst on steroids.

The early pages of the novel are profoundly about college life, the freshman year in particular, when the two women grow so close they’re almost inseparable.  George (everybody calls her that, mocking her bizarre name) flounders academically, out of her element, but Ann—though the two girls lie awake talking half the night—is a superb student.  She’s one of those people who has it all.  But she’s deeply uncomfortable with her privileged life, everything about it, and by the end of her sophomore year has dropped out, as has George, for different reasons.  George gets a job at a fashion magazine, and suddenly thrives.  Ann becomes deeply politicized.

Ann is like the most radical person you met at college, the most politically correct, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter.  Those movements didn’t exist back then—sexual harassment was in full flower in academia and the magazine world—but in another way they did; they’ve always been around.  We eventually discover that Ann was this way from the time she was a little girl; she once saw a homeless person whom she wanted to help, and wouldn’t forgive—perhaps never forgave—her parents for not bringing him home and nursing him to health.  She lived in a world of absolutes, while we live in a relative world.  We make compromises.  She never would.

The most intense instance of that comes after she’s married her African American husband[1], and has George over for dinner.  The man does seem like a good catch, though he’s ten years older than Ann and mildly condescending.  George has always looked up to Ann and wanted to please her.  After a long evening where she tries to do everything right, George makes one remark toward the end—she actually pays a compliment to the husband—and Ann blows her stack.  Their friendship ends on the spot.

Ann returns to George’s life as an object of interest when she kills a policeman who had pulled her husband over.  He was on a motorcycle; she saw the stop from an upstairs window, and shot from there (she had, in her privileged background, even learned how to use a gun).  She is absolutely unrepentant at her trial.  She could see the police were harassing her husband because he was black and believed they were looking for—and had found—an excuse to kill him.  She was sentenced to prison for what amounted to the rest of her life.  She was in her twenties when the sentence came down.

I can’t argue with Ann’s political convictions.  (She would have destroyed me in an argument anyway.)  But she’s an all or nothing human being; she’s somehow not able to see that, even if the cop was abusing her husband, it might be nice to express some remorse to the man’s widow.  And a person who’s right about everything rubs everyone the wrong way.  The husband’s family thought she was actually responsible for his death, that it was her opening fire that caused the cops to kill him.  It’s possible to be right in every particular but also terribly wrong in the aggregate.  She’s one of those people.

As in The Friend, there is a plot twist toward the end of this novel, having to do with Ann’s family, that seems absolutely brilliant to me.  I would never have guessed such a thing would happen, but it gives us all kinds of new information.  There is another narrative twist that seems equally brilliant: a long article written by an African American woman inside the prison entitled “Orphan Annie and the Hand of God.”  Ann’s political correctness and radical fervor didn’t go over in prison either.  She couldn’t win anywhere.

This novel feels “major” in a way that the two more recent novels do not.  It sums up an era, while the more recent novels look at the closing days of life.  The later novels nevertheless seem greater to me, perfectly formed.  But  this book might be her most ambitious.

[1] I don’t have the text with me in my mountain cabin, and forget his name.