72 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
a spectacle of their failure, like Nunez’s
intellectual vamp, or shrivel into invis-
ibility. That modern societies, and An-
glo-American society in particular, treat
the elderly as unseemly and disposable
should come as no surprise to anyone
who has followed the news for the past
six months.
For all Nunez’s knowing humor
and dispassionate tone, her narrator
embodies the injustices of
aging that estrange women
from social life, from one
another, and from them-
selves. The narrator’s gentle
disdain for her Airbnb host
(who looks “like a fright-
ened toddler,” she thinks),
her open hostility toward
the glam academic—these
reactions would have been
easily comprehensible to
her intellectual predecessors. Growing
old, according to Simone de Beauvoir,
transformed a woman into an “Other,”
with the same anguish and irresolution
that first becoming a woman did. “As
men see it, a woman’s purpose in life
is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir
wrote in her 1970 book, “The Com-
ing of Age.” “When she grows old
and ugly she loses the place allotted
to her in society: she becomes a mon-
strum that excites revulsion and even
dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag
repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her
1972 essay “The Double Standard of
Aging,” adding that women often in-
ternalized other people’s revulsion as
their own shame—a self-loathing made
more unbearable for the high premium
they had once placed on their youth and
beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather
on the Breath of God,” published in
1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony.
That book’s narrator tries to explain her
sexual recklessness to an older woman,
“a stout, shapeless, housemother-type,
with a homely manner of speaking and
an even homelier face. I look at that
face and think: How can she possibly
understand? This woman has never
been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez
narrator is no longer young, and her
face is more ravaged than ravished. Now
she wants to look at the faces of the el-
derly women she meets, and, setting
aside both sentimentality and her con-
tempt, try simply to listen; to pay at-
tention; to understand what they are
going through. What Nunez requires
of the novel is a formal commitment to
impersonality—or as close as one can
get to impersonality while still writing
in the first person. The narrator reveals
little of her life, and rarely betrays her
emotions. Her voice is calm, direct, aph-
oristic; at moments, humorously affec-
tionate. She walks among
other elderly women, sum-
moning powers of concen-
tration and perception to
make their suffering coex-
tensive with hers. “Flaubert
said, To think is to suffer,”
she muses. “Is this the same
as Aristotle’s To perceive is
to suffer?” Through her
thoughtful gaze, the novel
begins to extend its im-
perfect grace to all who are aging grace-
lessly in this modern world—which is
to say, everyone.“W
hat Are You Going Through”
takes its title from a line in Si-
mone Weil’s extraordinary essay “Reflec-
tions on the Right Use of School Studies
with a View to the Love of God.” Writ-
ten in 1942, the essay traces the tender,
joyful relationship between attention and
grace that Nunez’s novel also unfurls.
Weil held that the proper aim of school
studies was to learn to increase one’s power
of attention, so that, eventually, one could
turn one’s whole attention to God in
prayer. Classroom exercises helped to cul-
tivate the habit of attention, though the
pure, intense, and untired attention that
Weil believed brought God nearer to us
did not emerge from hard work and out-
ward ambition, from “the kind of frown-
ing application that leads us to say with
a sense of duty done: ‘I have worked well!’”
Attention was an effort, but it was a “neg-
ative effort.” It called forth first the in-
herent pleasure of contemplating some-
thing external to oneself—an equation,
a poem, another human being—and then
the willingness to wait, neither seeking
a problem nor desiring a solution but
simply allowing the truth to arrive. “At-
tention consists of suspending our
thought, leaving it detached, empty, and
ready to be penetrated by the object,”
Weil wrote. The void created by atten-
tion would be filled by the full flow ofgrace: the abandonment of the self to the
beauty of the surrounding world.
References to Weil’s philosophy ap-
pear throughout Nunez’s books, from
“The Last of Her Kind” (2006) to “Sem-
pre Susan” (2011)—a memoir of Son-
tag, who introduced Nunez to Weil’s
writing—to “The Friend” (2018). “What
Are You Going Through” is the only
one to elevate Weil’s doctrine of atten-
tion into an organizing principle, shap-
ing its structure, its narrative voice, and
its temporality. Each conversation the
narrator has is an exercise in attention:
an occasion for her to shed her sense of
self and to wait to receive the being she
is looking at, just as she is, in all her
truth. The slackness of the novel’s plot
and the simple, unmarked quality of
Nunez’s sentences are part of the nar-
rator’s self-effacement. Every trace of
her particularity, of her imagination,
must be vanquished. Only then can she
catch and turn into words the spirit of
the women she encounters. That most
of these women are elderly or sick, dis-
gruntled and often unpleasant, makes
her task even harder. “The capacity to
give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very
rare and difficult thing,” Weil wrote.
“The love of our neighbor in all its full-
ness simply means being able to say to
him: ‘What are you going through?’ It
is a recognition that the sufferer exists,
not only as a unit in a collection, or a
specimen from the social category la-
beled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, ex-
actly like us, who was one day stamped
with a special mark by affliction.”
That the narrator will fail, or that she
will not succeed entirely, is a given. She
is not God, the only true source of grace.
She cannot suffer fools gladly. But as the
novel progresses she learns to fail better.
The tension that animates the narrative
is her transformation of the “I” into a
porous figure, capable of speaking for
and through others, in what becomes al-
most a collective expression of affliction.
In the beginning, the women she meets
arouse her scorn. They appear before her
as types rather than as distinctive human
beings: there are even two characters she
calls Woman A and Woman B. At the
gym the narrator attends, she examines
another familiar specimen: the once beau-
tiful woman. “In middle age she is toned
but overweight, her precise features have
blurred, the dazzle is gone,” the narrator