Sigrid Nunez at the New School.
When the Page Becomes a Stage
By Deborah Emin
It is awkward to review a friend’s book, but here you have before you a review (sort of) of a friend’s book. I have known Sigrid Nunez almost as long as I have lived in New York City. Trading on that friendship, I asked her to let me interview her upon the release of her newest novel, The Last of Her Kind. Graciously, she not only agreed to an interview but also hand-delivered an advance copy. Our conversation occurred in December before most of the reviews had appeared and while her pre-publication enthusiasm and excitement were at their height.
Sigrid has written four previous novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, and For Rouenna. The new novel, she says, grew out of her previous one, but not without exploring several side roads before arriving at its story.
A brief plot description is in order for you to understand: a) what the novel is about; and b) why I want to use my discussion of this book as a springboard from which to explore one of the major critical issues of this moment in the 21st century: the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between fiction and memoir.
The Last of Her Kind explores an old story of two people from different worlds meeting, and the ways in which their personal experiences influence each other’s lives. The narrator is Georgette George, from a poor upstate New York family; she arrives at Barnard College in 1968. Her roommate, Georgette soon discovers, is Ann Drayton from the elite world of wealth and privilege, now in the full-blown process of rejecting her heritage. Ann had wanted a black roommate, but settles for this poor white young woman whose life she romanticizes. While Ann tries to further her beliefs and theories through political activism, the necessary fight occurs to separate these two friends. Now Georgette goes off to find her own way.
A long hiatus ensues, during which time Ann’s life develops and Georgette focuses on her own kid sister – a runaway who has turned up on Georgette’s doorstep. Solange, the sister, has numerous problems, which Georgette must find some way to ameliorate, and this causes her to forget (at least for the moment) Ann and their tumultuous friendship – until Georgette learns that Ann has shot a policeman whom she thought was about to kill her black husband. The remaining drama has a great deal to do with Ann’s trial and subsequent imprisonment and martyrdom. Along the way, Georgette becomes romantically and sexually involved with Ann’s father, and the sturm und drang of this relationship causes her to re-think who Ann is and where she comes from.
While the ending seems to me recklessly courageous, I don’t think its full meaning becomes clear until later, when Georgette and her children ride in a cab on their way uptown to visit Solange, who has become a writer. Georgette and her son and daughter argue about the relative merits of another novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which has been referred to often throughout this book, and which Georgette frequently claims to dislike. Nevertheless, she ruminates on the similarities between the feelings expressed in Gatsby and her own.
When Sigrid and I discussed her novel, she emphasized that the motivation for it came from the fact that she had grown up in the era in which it takes place.
“When I began,” Sigrid said, “what I started with was thinking about that situation of being a certain age and living as if in a marriage in a small room, meaning the college dormitory. I liked the time, my own time, and the campus where I went to school. I knew I wanted to write about something that happened. However, none of these people [in the book] are real. The atmosphere is real, but the action is completely invented.”
Sigrid went on to say that the only autobiographical elements had to do with “the particularly heady times, the late ’60s, and that campus, which all coincided with my youth and coming of age.” She had not determined what the story was fully about; she just began by imagining these “two girls from opposite worlds, and what would happen.” Whatever the particular alchemy that can cause an imagined relationship to become a 375-page novel is beyond my scope. What is of interest to me, and I hope to you, is the ignition of a story by actual events. Sigrid did go to Barnard. She lived through the 1960s in New York City, and she worked in publishing. While those trace elements of an identity are not necessarily the only autobiographical features of the story, they are what we know.
The Last of Her Kind was reviewed recently in the Sunday Times Book Review. It was an unfortunate choice of reviewers because of the final question asked: Why hadn’t Sigrid written the novel as a memoir?
The novel is clearly marked a novel. When Sigrid’s first novel was published, I mistakenly referred to it as a memoir. She corrected me, and was right to do so. In the 1970s and ’80s, people played parlor games with novels: Who was who and what was real? It was fashionable (though ultimately disastrous) to think that one could delineate the psychological and autobiographical details of known people in a novel, and that that was more interesting than what the story was about.
Readers of novels have a certain set of expectations that are different or should be different from what is expected from nonfiction. While it may be fair to know that Sigrid drew on a specific time, her personal circumstances are of no real interest. What matters is the narrative drive that shapes the story’s movement from beginning to end.
Let us move on to a different set of questions: What expectations can and should we have of this imaginary story set in a real time and place? I also lived through the 1960s and had similar experiences to the ones Sigrid had, but what I discovered while reading this book is that it’s possible for similar experiences not to even intersect.
Thus we arrive at the most fascinating aspect of writing a novel or a review or almost anything that needs to have a shape – the decisions about what to include and what to exclude that a writer must make from moment to moment. Ruminating on Sigrid’s choices, I find myself categorizing them as a series of aesthetic ones, with her story-telling striving to create balance out of imbalance.
An example is evident in Sigrid’s comment about putting two people in a room together “as if in a marriage” to see what happens. Then, because Ann was an only child, Sigrid decided to make Georgette one of many. She did this, she said, so she could make up stories about the other members of Georgette’s family. Privately, I wondered what would have happened if the two women had been allowed to be only children? What kinds of choices would that allow?
Sigrid chose to bestow upon Georgette’s sister Solange the weight of that other family member. Solange’s experiences (as they are recounted to Georgette) comprise the bulk of that curious balance and order that keeps the novel moving. Solange travels cross-country, has the obligatory Woodstock experience (albeit in truncated form), meets up with rock stars, and has a number of drug experiences along with the requisite sexual experiences that all result in the predictable mental-health problems. Other members of Georgette’s family, particularly her mother, take up powerful emotional spaces but are not main actors; they are there for Georgette to react against.
At the other extreme of this “marriage” is Ann Drayton’s story. While in many ways the whole reason for the novel, it is the least experienced by the reader. That’s Sigrid’s choice. As an imagined and emblematic character, Ann presents some difficulties for the reader, or at least this reader. What is most difficult to portray is a character determined by a set of diktats that make any action or development on her part almost negligible. Ann comes across as disingenuous from the beginning, and her brand of radical politics and social concern, while admirable, are insufferable. Who would want to know, as Georgette comes to know, that one is chosen to be someone’s roommate because one is poor – not only that, but Georgette was a second choice because no black person could be found?
When, as a reader, I await the connection with the characters that will allow me to feel pain, humiliation, or some noticeable alliance, and that connection doesn’t materialize, the question then becomes: Why not? Is it because the story is making me so uncomfortable that I can’t allow myself to give in to it? Do I think the whole conceit is misguided? Or does the answer lie in some middle space in which I am being kept off balance in relation to what I am witnessing?
Remember: This novel is told in the first person, by Georgette. My initial instinct is to associate myself with the “I” telling the story. But what if that association never happens? What if, in the course of telling this story, Sigrid discovered a first person that is really more of a third person? Yes, memoirists use the “I”; Holden Caufield used it to tantalize us; Portnoy used it to rage; and every person who has ever chosen to tell a personal narrative has used it. But maybe what I have been engaged in here is a process more like watching a play – a sophisticated usage of the first-person that has nothing to do with the psychological acuity or deeply emotional revelations that we normally associate with first-person accounts. Here, perhaps, we have a narrative play that uses the page as a stage.
In her own unique way, Sigrid Nunez has set a story in a time and place we thought we knew, and yet has found a way to make it unknown and mysterious. It is as if we never lived through New York City in the 1960s at all.
