Nunez tackles the big questions

Novel presents a meditation on birth, life, death — and the whole damn thing

What Are You Going Through Sigrid Nunez

Riverhead

What Are You Going Through initially resembles Rachel Cusk's fiction — narrated by a fiercely intelligent teacher and writer, describing encounters with a series of individuals whose difficult stories accrue like mosaic pieces to form a painfully human tableau. Nunez's prose, too, seems to echo Cusk's cool, flat distance.

Nunez — whose previous novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award — has long taught creative writing; thus, these pages dish some authoritative dirt about that world. Here's the department head who's invited the above speaker:

“She is 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 sexless harridan.”

But Nunez's project has grander designs than mere literary satire or clever portraiture. It will meditate — at length, in earnest, often graphically — upon whatever life, death and love can presently mean.

The above speaker's message cuts to the chase: We're doomed. Also, better not go on having children. What's left?

This view, taken with the fact that the narrator's about to visit an old friend succumbing to cancer, may baffle readers for its impenetrable bleakness. In the story to follow, the narrator's mortally ill friend, anticipating the horrors of cancer treatment, confesses she means to end matters early, with pills. “Cancer can't get me if I get me first.” She asks the narrator's help in renting a pleasant retreat where the two can dwell together.

There they settle in, and talk. Over this structure, Nunez's narrator layers a book's worth of memories and reflections — told “Decameron”-style as stories-within-the-story: struggles with children, lovers, husbands, money, art. These accounts range with great freedom, even as dwindling time tightens the frame. The narrator despairs of keeping “a record of my friend's last days” as a likely betrayal, not of her friend's privacy “but of the experience itself ...”

Nunez's narrator folds incident, anecdote, history, rumour — even fairy tales — into a plaintive litany. Toward the end she describes a podcast of terminally ill people (including her friend), mulling their lives aloud.

Replying to a social worker's query, “What do you think is the meaning of your life?” the narrator's friend snaps: “That it stops.”

One's moved by the scope and pith of this novel's ambition, as it addresses our biggest questions. Most striking may be how Nunez's narrator transfigures, through deepening compassion, from a wry observer into someone raked raw with love for her vanishing friend: “Every now and then she would squeeze my hand ... as if she had squeezed my heart.”

What's more, the narrator already foresees memory's distancing of this extraordinary interval, lending it “that taint of the surreal.”

This infuriates her. “Life is but a dream ... Could there be a crueler notion?”