90 Time September 21/September 28, 2020
TimeOff Books
iT’s sepTember 2017, and an unnamed
middle- aged writer attends a lecture at a college.
Her ex-boyfriend, an author, is speaking about
the bleak future of humankind. He presents the
growing threats to civilization— cyber terrorism,
climate change, global jihadism—and offers no
sense of hope. “It was too late, we had dithered too
long,” he says. “Our society had already become
too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in
time, the calamitous mistakes we had made.”
When the lecture is over, the writer stumbles
out of the auditorium in search of a drink, which
she finds at a local café. There, she overhears a
father and daughter discuss the recent passing of
the daughter’s mother. The writer is a fy on the
wall, listening closely to their intimate conversa-
tion. It’s these moments that fill the first pages
of Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, What Are You Going
Through, which follows the unnamed writer as she
recounts a series of interactions of subtle impor-
tance. Among the people she describes are her pre-
tentious ex with the doomsday attitude, the Airbnb
host whose cat died before her stay and a woman
from her gym who is obsessed with losing weight.
As the novel explores this tapestry of daily life,
it comes to emphasize one specific thread: the
writer’s friend who is dying of cancer. While sitting
at a bar they used to frequent years ago, the friend
tells the writer that she dislikes the word terminal.
“Terminal makes me think of bus stations, which
makes me think of exhaust fumes and creepy men
prowling for runaways,” the friend explains. This
is when she reveals that she has obtained a eutha-
nasia drug. She wants to die—and she asks the
writer to be her companion through her final days.
It’s unsurprIsIng that Nunez’s latest book is
concerned with death and friendship—and the vo-
cabulary we use to describe it all. Her last novel,
2018 National Book Award winner The Friend,
followed a woman in the wake of her best friend
and mentor’s suicide. The protagonist took in the
man’s Great Dane, who was too big for the minus-
cule New York City apartment where they learned
to live and grieve together. Both books ask how we
remember the most meaningful relationships in
our lives—and do so without relying on plot.
In What Are You Going Through, Nunez leans
on the writer’s introspective tendencies to the
point where the novel veers into essayistic terri-
tory. She begins one section with the proclamation
“ Women’s stories are often sad stories,” then
shares the separate experiences of two women.
One contemplates what it means to grow older,
while the other has an inappropriate interaction
with an elderly man. Individually, these moments
may feel unrelated to the writer, but together
they create a larger portrait of the pain she endures
and how she tells stories to make sense of it.
This becomes important for the writer as
she witnesses the suffering of her dying friend.
Though the situation is steeped in sadness, it’s
never melodramatic. Nunez describes the friend’s
plan in declarative prose, and finds the space
for humor just when it’s needed most. After the
writer tells her friend she’ll accompany her to
the end, the friend says, “I promise to make it
as fun as possible.”
As their plan is set in motion, the question
that connects the pieces of What Are You Going
Through becomes clear: At what point is the pain
too much? The two women don’t know the answer.
They are both finding it difficult to categorize
what they are going through. The friend doesn’t
know how to describe her new relationship with
the writer, and simply refers to it as “all this.”
The writer remarks to herself, “all this: the
inexorable, the inexpressible.” It’s a sentiment
echoed throughout the book: sometimes the
only words we have are insufficient to express
what we really want to say. REVIEW
On death and
friendship
By Annabel Gutterman
△
Nunez’s
eighth novel
tackles
suffering