THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 71
For Nunez’s narrator, attention to those around her becomes a kind of duty.
BOOKS
AGING UNGRACEFULLY
Sigrid Nunez’s women confront the indignities of their declining years.
BY MERVEEMRE
ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR
L
ife is short, it is said, though not as
short as the vast majority of novels
would have us believe. Youth is the play-
thing of the novel—certainly of the bil-
dungsroman, with its lost illusions and
great expectations, and of the midlife
novel, whose characters cast off the
shackles of adulthood to claim the sym-
bolic passions of an earlier age. Even
novels about growing old look back
more intently than they look down at
the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty.
In Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein” and Philip
Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” the spec-
tre of death quickens and focusses mem-
ory. It compels reminiscences, flash-
backs; drives wheezy little men into the
arms of younger women whose beauty
and vitality they cling to like Odysseus
to his rock. There such novels hang, too,
amid the misty romance of the past,
fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture
no longer waits faithfully on the hori-
zon. Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez’s
“What Are You Going Through” (Riv-
erhead) says, “But after a certain age,
that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t
happen, it can’t happen.”
Nunez’s novel wants to be an excep-
tion that proves the rule. Its task is an
unenviable one: to strip old age of what-
ever illusions the novel has imparted
to it; to verify the truth and significance
of aging and dying by turning the cool
white light of Nunez’s prose on every
vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple,
wandering, and loosely associative: an
unnamed, first-person narrator, “a fe-
male of a certain age,” keeps the com-
pany of a friend who is dying of can-
cer. In the beginning, the friend is in
the hospital in a college town. Unlike
most college towns, this one is curi-
ously devoid of anyone young. The peo-
ple the narrator encounters are not
merely old but aging badly, with a
self-consciousness that makes them
pitiful, impious, and occasionally vul-
gar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired
librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four,
the grandmother of six”; she has a fat,
slack face, and is ashamed to be griev-
ing the death of her only companion,
her cat. The narrator attends a talk about
environmental collapse delivered by a
famous writer, a man whose arrogant
features—his “stark-white hair, beaky
nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince
the look of entitlement “that comes to
many older white men at a certain age.”
The woman who introduces his talk is
a professor, also “a familiar type: the
glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:
Someone at pains for it to be known that,
although smart and well educated, although a
feminist and a woman in a position of power,
the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sex-
less harridan. And so what if she’s past a certain
age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the
heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair...
everything says: I’m still fuckable.
“A certain age”—the phrase echoes
mockingly through the early chapters
of the novel, which find the narrator
relaying conversations she has with other
unnamed women about growing old.
Irony occasionally swells into contempt,
though the contempt hardly belongs to
the narrator alone. Disdain for the el-
derly is a distinctly modern form of
brutality, difficult to imagine before the
nineteenth century, when great gains
in life expectancy turned aging into a
moral and aesthetic project. No doubt
women are its primary targets. No doubt
they suffer more for it. Obliged to learn
the art of “aging gracefully” (the phrase
appears as early as an 1894 newspaper
article promising that old ladies “are a
thing of the past”) in a culture where
productivity and reproductivity are the
measure of a woman’s worth, women
invariably fail to do so, and either make
