American author Sigrid Nunez had been somewhat overlooked before her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book award. Like its predecessor, What Are You Going Through is told from the perspective of a writer in late middle age, and the primary narrative revolves around the suicide of an old friend: in this case, a woman who, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, asks for assistance to end her life. It opens in 2017 with the narrator attending a lecture that details the insurmountable problems of the climate crisis, as well as “the inevitable next great flu pandemic”. The talk, which asserts that reproduction itself is selfish in the face of climate collapse, ends with the suggestion that all humans can do is come to terms with devastation, “love and forgive one another as best we could. And learn how to say goodbye.” The novel is an attempt at this: both personally and culturally, it concerns itself with the end of things.
What Are You Going Through is at its best in this investigation of finality, asking questions about the will to survive, its value and its cost. After initially refusing treatment because of the side effects, the unnamed friend experiences a feeling of anticlimax when she briefly believes that it has worked. The complex intimacy between the women, as they spend time together in a holiday house and prepare for the end, is powerfully affecting.
Yet despite the fact that What Are You Going Through is structured as a novel-in-chorus, incorporating many people’s stories into the narrative through their conversations with the narrator, the two central characters are the only ones drawn with complexity. The book’s epigraph is the Simone Weil quote from which it takes its title, “The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’”, but this is applied to other characters in the book with a superficiality that does not extend to compassion. Other people are unintelligent, irritating, selfish, unlikable: the narrator is always sure of her superiority and she never changes her mind. In this way, the novel feels unintentionally representative of the imaginative failure of contemporary liberalism: its inability to even envisage, let alone work towards, different social structures. Clearly distressed at the state of American society, and endeavouring through her conversations with others to understand how we’ve ended up here, the narrator nevertheless cannot extend her practice of listening beyond critique, towards a mutual interpersonal respect that might open up new possibilities for a better, more communal future.
Women are represented with peculiar vitriol. Of a woman at the gym, the narrator declares: “In middle age she is toned but overweight, her precise features have blurred, the dazzle is gone.” After describing a female academic as “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”, she imagines her being humiliated by a male professor paying attention instead to a grad student who, “after just one glass of wine, is responding to his frequent glances with increasingly bold ones of her own”. The idea that young women are at fault for men’s sexual indiscretions is repeated throughout, notably in the suggestion that her friend’s daughter (always an “extraordinarily unlikable little girl”) was responsible when her mother’s boyfriend seduced her.
In this context, the structural motif that recurs throughout the book, in which the narrator reads and paraphrases the plot of a misogynist crime novel, falls curiously flat. The novel tries to position itself as an empathetic depository of women’s pain – “Women’s stories are often sad stories,” one chapter begins – but limits itself to observations about the perceived aesthetic decline of women’s bodies as they age. After quoting an Ingeborg Bachmann story at length, the narrator writes: “Since these words were written […] men and women have become even more divided.” And then, immediately afterwards: “Red states and blue states.” This analogy, in a book highly concerned with the aftermath of the 2016 election, makes little sense; after all, the majority of white women in America voted for Trump. “According to Bachmann,” the narrator continues, “fascism is the primary element in the relation between a man and a woman. Overstated.” By erasing the context of Bachmann’s writing – born in Austria in 1926, she was deeply engaged with fascism and its legacies at both a philosophical and personal level – this becomes another glib point in a series, demonstrating only that the narrator has read a lot.
Towards the end of the novel, the doomsday climate professor becomes a more three-dimensional character. His “monomaniacal” obsession stems in part, he admits, from a desire for his grandchildren to forgive him. In the final pages, the narrator sits on a park bench, “blessing” those that pass, asking for forgiveness herself. What Are You Going Through reaches, in its second part, towards mercy; it just fails to believe that everyone deserves it.
• What Are You Going Through is published by Virago (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
