THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 73
observes. “In the locker room she sits
hunched and swathed in towels with a
look of grievance on her face.” Yet, as the
narrator turns to another once beautiful
woman, physical description and the
frame of conversation begin to fall away.
Now this once beautiful woman’s “I” is
allowed to merge with the narrator’s:
I remember, the elderly and once beauti-
ful woman said, after I reached a certain age
it was like a bad dream—one of those night-
mares where for some reason no one you know
recognizes you anymore.... I’d never been in
the position of having to work at making peo-
ple like and admire me. Suddenly I was all shy
and socially awkward. Worse, I started to feel
paranoid. Had I turned into one of those pa-
thetic people always trying to get others to like
them when everyone knows that that’s just the
sort of person other people never do like?
Why should one heed this woman
and women like her? For Weil, the high-
est purpose of attention and its erasure
of the self was to draw closer to God.
Nunez focusses her attention instead on
nature—“and through her, God,” Tho-
reau might have added. The inevitabil-
ity of environmental devastation looms
over the novel. Nature, too, is a once
beautiful thing that time has ravaged,
that men have defaced. Its decline is also
characterized as a problem of attention.
“People’s attention remained elusive,” the
writer who gives a talk on climate change
complains. He blames first the creative,
well-educated types who embraced “per-
sonal therapies and pseudo-religious
practices that promoted detachment, a
focus on the moment”; then the child
bearers, eager to affirm life no matter the
cost to the planet. What crisis requires
is not compassion, the writer insists, but
“a collective, fanatical, over-the-top ob-
session with impending doom.”
Against such dreary prognostications,
“What Are You Going Through” offers
no grandiose claims about how its ethic
of attention might drive collective
human action. Nobody communes with
giant redwood trees. No desert land-
scapes shimmer with an incipient con-
sciousness. Yet Nunez has been drawn
to the minds of animals since at least
“Mitz” (1998), a mock biography of Vir-
ginia and Leonard Woolf ’s marmoset,
and never more so than in “The Friend,”
whose plot turned on its narrator’s re-
lationship with a melancholy Great
Dane named Apollo. Now she uses
Weil’s mysticism to model how paying
attention to the dying body might train
one to pay attention to the dying planet
and all its suffering species. One night,
the narrator speaks—or dreams that she
speaks—to a kitten named Booger, ad-
opted by her Airbnb host to replace the
cat that died. Booger recalls his first
home; the fire that destroyed it; the boys
who found him wandering the streets,
frail and hungry; the dumpster they
threw him in after abusing him. “I began
to cry, making my voice as big as pos-
sible, said the cat, and very big indeed
it sounded to me in that void, but no
one heard, no one came, and soon I had
no voice left to cry.” The narrator draws
no distinction between how one might
listen to a person and how one might
listen to a cat. Why should she? The
void they cry into is the same. Their
need to be seen and saved is identical.T
he first time I read “What Are You
Going Through,” I was neither im-
pressed nor moved. Nunez seemed to
be writing herself into a lineage of writ-
ers who took the power of attention to
be the ethical imperative of literature.
The novel nods at Virginia Woolf, Inge-
borg Bachmann, and Elizabeth Hard-
wick, writers whose techniques of at-
tentiveness work, in their different ways,
to dissolve interiority into exteriority,
mind into world. But Nunez doesn’t
have Woolf ’s ecstatic sensuality or Bach-
mann’s philosophical rigor or Hard-
wick’s swashbuckling flair. The novel’s
spiritual imagination certainly inter-
ested me—it sent me in search of Weil’s
essay. But aligning the novel’s aesthet-
ics with its ethics seemed to demand
too great a sacrifice on the altar of style.
Frequently, my mind wandered.
Then I read the novel again. Perhaps
my distraction had been a defensive pose.
“Most people are in denial about aging,
just as they are about dying,” Nunez writes.
Perhaps writing about a novel cultivates
a practice of attentiveness that replaces
the subjectivity of one’s initial judgment
with a more undesiring form of argu-
ment—and, through it, appreciation. Re-
reading “What Are You Going Through,”
I was dazed by the novel’s grace: its cre-
ation of a narrative consciousness that,
by emptying and extending itself to oth-
ers, insured that its vitality would never
dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured
what Woolf, in her exquisite story onaging, “The Lady in the Looking Glass,”
describes as life’s “profounder state of
being,” “the state that is to the mind what
breathing is to the body.” Could one fault
Nunez’s novel for its imperfections? For
leaving its strands a little frayed and thin?
“I have tried,” the narrator thinks. “What
does it matter if I failed.”
Some might call this resignation the
“wisdom of age.” I find the phrase both
patronizing and misguided. One does
not have to live long to discover that
there is no natural connection between
age and wisdom; at every age, it must
be attained, not assumed. Nunez’s novel
teaches an active concentration that in-
tensifies as the reach of death grows; a
concentration that becomes ever purer
and deeper, up until the moment of death,
when both attention and distraction
cease. Language quiets itself, then de-
parts, leaving us in silence. “It wasn’t that
we had nothing more to say to each
other but rather that our need for speech
kept diminishing,” the narrator recalls
of her dying friend. “A look, a gesture
or touch—sometimes not even that
much—and all was understood. The far-
ther along she was on her journey, the
less she wanted to be distracted.” As the
end draws near, the novel’s prose grows
sparser, fractured and radiant with mean-
ing. The tense floats between past, pres-
ent, and future. A sense of perpetuity is
born and contemplated. “What is hap-
pening?” the narrator wonders. “This
saddest time in my life that has also been
one of the happiest times in my life will
pass. And I’ll be alone.”
Alone, save for one shadowy pres-
ence—the reader. “What draws the
reader to the novel is the hope of warm-
ing his shivering life with a death he
reads about,” Walter Benjamin wrote in
his 1936 essay “The Storyteller.” Nunez’s
narrator quotes Benjamin on the nov-
el’s last page, as she waits on a bench in
the park outside her friend’s apartment,
not knowing if she is alive or dead. It is
essential that the narrator must never
find out when she dies; that the novel
must refuse to relegate her friend’s hap-
piness or unhappiness to remembrance;
that it must resist fixing the meaning
of life through the definitiveness of
death. The woman sitting on the park
bench is not cold. What warms her is
not a death she reads about but the glow
from a life that persists.