Life going on, in spite of everything
WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH
by Sigrid Nunez (Little, Brown, $35)
I’m always a bit nervous to surrender myself to a pukapuka: it’s a risk to let an unknown kaituhi into my brain. But with What Are You Going Through, I needn’t have worried.
Sigrid Nunez is a US writer at the absolute top of her game. Her writing is intelligent, sensitive and big: big in scope, depth and effect. It is also beautifully accessible and often funny: “I took out my phone, that reliable prop, and spent a few moments tickling it.”
Her latest novel is about a middle-aged woman whose dying friend asks her to be with her when she takes a life-ending drug. It was, to my surprise, the perfect read through our current Covid reemergence. A recurring theme in What Are You Going Through is the loss of one’s ability to concentrate and enjoy: “My own interest in things has been shrinking ... I haven’t read a novel in, oh, I can’t even say how long. In fact, the only books I read now are for work. I watch a little television when I’m too exhausted to do anything else. But I never go to the movies anymore.
No museums, no concerts. No vacations.”
Another theme is the limits of writing: “Language would falsify everything ... [writing] did not have the steadying or consoling power I’d hoped for. It did not soothe me. It frustrated me instead. It made me feel ... hopeless.”
This is brutally close to home for me as kaituhi and kaipanui — yet also reassuring. Acknowledging the difficulty of reading and writing in these anxious times paradoxically makes it easier to do both.
Although this pukapuka is set before the pandemic (People gather! With their bodies! In large numbers! Good god, they may as well lick each other’s shoes), it shows a recognisably Covidious world in crisis. One character gives public talks about how climate change will definitely result in the extinction of humans and we’ve missed our chance to stop it. He holds out no hope — and he refuses to take questions from the audience, simply leaving the stage when he’s done. His listeners are left in silence, drained and baffled.
Nunez does not make this mistake. What Are You Going Through faces up to ageing, illness, pain and death; but through the grief Nunez never loses sight of aroha.
The unnamed narrator and her dying friend grow to love one another all the more dearly as they prepare for her death, finding moments of joy. “Sunlight falling at an angle across the lawn so that it touched our elevated feet, then moved up our bodies like a long slow blessing, and I found myself a breath away from believing that everything was as it should be ... Life going on, in spite of everything. Messy life. Unfair life. Life that must be dealt with. That I must deal with.”
At a time of great anxiety, Nunez helped me exhale — and then get on with my messy life, in spite of everything.