Sigrid Nunez’s "What Are You Going Through" Finds Love for One’s Neighbor
Sigrid Nunez’s latest novel, What Are You Going Through, opens with her narrator attending a talk on climate change. Elucidating the inevitability of our species’ and our planet’s collapse is a man the narrator later reveals to be her ex. She only attends his doomsday lecture accidentally–she is in town not to see him but to visit her terminally ill friend in hospital. Though the novel is made up of others’ stories, like the ex’s, told to us by the narrator in understated prose, the intimacy developed with her dying friend serves as its nucleus. Thus, Nunez begins a narrative about aging and dying with the threat of hopelessness for the world left behind. And yet, on the way out of the lecture hall, the narrator overhears a man humming “My Favorite Things” and the irony is not lost on her. Or us.
What Are You Going Through is a luminous novel about remembering, mourning, and above all, listening. Nunez’s unnamed narrator, a writer and professor who remains unmarried and has chosen not to have children, is that rare and valuable person in society who observes the lives of others.
“What are you going through? When Simone Weil said that being able to ask this question was what love of one’s neighbor truly meant, she was writing in her native French. And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?” With a quiet focus, the narrator leads readers to answers in the form of stories woven into the book. These tourments the narrator recalls and retells come from a woman at her gym, an aging friend losing her beauty, a neighbor, a hilarious documentary made up of people’s prayers to Jesus, and most notably, a cat. The narrator never forces a poignant takeaway for these stories within the story, which would undoubtedly turn the novel heavy and saccharine. None of the stories’ protagonists are particularly heroic; yet they each carry burdens and histories which Nunez, in her keen, distilled style, and with her narrator’s attention, makes engaging.
The narrator serves as witness throughout the book. After a woman at the gym confesses to hating her body reflected in the mirrors lining the locker rooms, the narrator admits to easily ignoring her own reflection–it’s not herself she wants to examine and reveal. Only in rare instances does she unveil a personal well of loss readers already sense is deep. “This is the saddest story I ever heard,” she remarks. Then later, it becomes a refrain: “Another saddest story.”
This narrator’s ear is finely tuned to the troubles we share and the ones we can’t bear alone, no matter how commonplace. During a conversation with the son of an elderly neighbor in her building, the narrator listens as he explains how vulnerable his mother is to scam callers. He asks, rhetorically, how those scammers can live with themselves. The narrator answers with a paradigm shift, easily intuiting their point of view, “‘Who had been there to look out for them? I said they could probably all name a dozen ways in which they’d been cheated out of something they thought they should have.” Then the son says, “‘You a psychologist?’ I told him I was a writer.”
These narratives are in conversation with the heart of the book, the narrator’s intensifying relationship with her ill friend, whom she accompanies to an oceanside town to spend her last days before planning to take a euthanasia drug. Their visit is shot through with the eccentricity of their Airbnb–from a living room portrait of a woman with “ostrich egg breasts,” to the paperback thriller following the narrator throughout the novel. A bizarre comfortability sets in though they expect the trip to end in death. Their intimacy grows, taking on an almost religious tinge. As they sit outside in a golden afternoon, cherishing the world which will go on (or as the narrator’s ex argues, will not) after the friend dies, they share a kiss. “I feel guilty leaving you behind,” her friend says. The friend’s digressions on her cancer are startling in their crisp criticisms of sentimentality and denial in the face of death. “Why should cancer be some kind of test of a person's mettle?” She asks. They cry with laughter at their running joke of themselves: “Lucy and Ethel Do Euthanasia.”
As in Nunez’s National Book Award winning novel, The Friend, What Are You Going Through explores human connection and its lack. The grief in her latest novel is all-encompassing; grief for our failing planet, for untold stories, ex lovers, the friend whose death she’s anticipating. Its narrator, although a writer, confesses to not finding the right words. With an allusion to The Tower of Babel, she explains that the real tragedy of language is how it separates us from each other; we only comprehend our own. How then do you write experience and its involvement with friends, lovers, neighbors, without falsifying it? Nunez has effortlessly managed it not only in The Friend, but in her latest novel as well.
By the end I wondered who was listening to our intelligent, conscientious narrator while she has been listening to everyone else. Who was considering her troubles? And then I realized that we, her readers, are listening.
What Are You Going Through
Sigrid Nunez
210 pages. 2020
About Olivia Nathan
Olivia Nathan is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College where she writes about femininity, agency, and her life so far. She is a proud alumna of Barnard College and originally from Los Angeles.
