Rich Girl, Poor Girl
College roommates pursue very different paths through turbulent times.
THE LAST OF HER KIND
A Novel
  (Anthony Russo) |
By Sigrid Nunez
Farrar Straus Giroux. 375 pp. $25
Sigrid Nunez begins her fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind , with this intriguing sentence: "We had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own."
Pairings of young women have had a long history in fiction -- from Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair to Scarlett and Melanie in Gone with the Wind to the Vassar classmates in Mary McCarthy's The Group , the prototype for so much women's fiction to this day. Traditionally, a rather bland and conventional woman has been paired with a much more compelling rulebreaker who in the end must pay heavily for her transgressions either by losing her status in society -- or by losing her life. In The Last of Her Kind , the formula receives a different spin, but it is still operative.
Nunez's ambitiously conceived novel covers three decades in the lives of her two women. It opens in that pivotal year 1968 (the year of Tet and the riots at the Democratic National Convention), when two 17-year-olds meet as freshmen at Barnard College. Each girl will shortly jettison her name. The socially insecure Georgette George, a scholarship student from an abusive, dirt-poor family in the northern reaches of New York state, will elect to be known simply as George, while Dooley Drayton, the raging disaffected daughter of wealthy, upper-class Connecticut parents, will insist on being addressed as Ann (the shameful "Dooley" being the patronymic of her Southern slaveholding ancestors). In fact, Ann will admit to George that what she had really hoped for was a black roommate: " 'I wish I were black' was a sentiment she had no qualms about expressing, was indeed constantly expressing -- though never within black hearing, it must be said. She felt only shame and horror at being a member of the cancerous (sometimes it was leprous ) white race." For her part, George, unacquainted with upper-class self-assurance, will wryly reflect that "I . . . would never have believed that I could have had any say in my choice of roommates."
The Ann Drayton character is one of the legacies of the 1960s -- the young woman who rejects everything having to do with her bourgeois past to become a revolutionary. With variations, this female figure keeps turning up in fiction (most notably in Philip Roth's American Pastoral ), supplying writers with a source of high-stakes drama that the liberations of the last half-century have leached out of novels about contemporary life. Nunez tries mightily to portray her in a fresh way. Ann is a rejectionist on a grand scale. She not only rejects everything tainted by class privilege -- from cashmere sweaters to her own bewildered, well-meaning parents -- but ultimately much of what the New Left has to offer as well, from SDS to the women's movement. No movement is pure enough for Ann.
Through George's narration, Nunez makes it clear that Ann has similarities to the philosopher Simone Weil, with whom she shares a predilection for martyrdom. (Another inspiration for this character, though unacknowledged, is obviously Kathy Boudin, former member of the radical Weather Underground.) The novelist wants us to believe in Ann's brilliance, nobility and honesty, but what we are shown over and over again is her insufferable self-righteousness. And Nunez makes no convincing case for the roots of Ann's fanaticism.
Perhaps what we would need in order to understand Ann is for some sections of this novel to be written from her point of view. Instead, it is George, who, in her self-consciously elaborate diction, tells Ann's story as well as relating her own, and Ann remains as much a mystery to her as she is to the reader. Nunez used a similar narrative device in her much praised previous novel, For Rouenna , which also focused on the relationship between two women, but in The Last of Her Kind , it becomes a kind of straitjacket.
The novel opens in the intimate tone of a memoir -- George as an older woman looking back, trying to make sense of the past. After sustaining this for many pages, Nunez starts interrupting the narrative with journalistic passages explicating the history and mores of the 1960s and '70s, ostensibly for the benefit of the younger generation. Indulging in more postmodernism, Nunez stretches the first-person point of view again when George relates the story of her sister Solange (yet another classic '60s type), a teenaged runaway flower child, who meets Mick Jagger at Altamont and becomes fixated on him. How is George able to tell us all this from Solange's point of view? The excuse is that she is paraphrasing the memoir her sister eventually published. George herself later resorts to writing awkward fiction about an affair with an unlikely older lover too painful to evoke in the first person: "The knowledge from the beginning that their love was doomed -- there was a fatal flaw in it, the angels were against it, the gods would make sport of it -- gave unnatural poignancy to their time. . . . It was, one or the other of them said, like being caressed one moment and lashed the next."
George may be pardoned for writing such a passage; she is too insecure to develop her literary gifts, though she eventually becomes the managing editor of a quarterly. Except for giving birth to two children, she never quite gets what she wants -- the sheltered, WASPish life Ann would have none of, with a husband like Ann's gentlemanly father. She becomes a woman who embraces the very femininity Ann vehemently rejects; her post-Barnard education takes place at a fashion magazine, where she learns to take delight in beauty products, pretty clothes, fine dining, tickets to the ballet. Thinking about Simone Weil's life in relation to Ann Drayton's, George admits: "This idea of Weil's, an idea shared by Ann and others whom I met at the same time I met her, the idea that the have-not was closer to God, that he alone possessed the truth about life, and that his spirit was greater than that of all those who had never known his wretched condition, a condition that was to be envied and imitated -- this idea was completely alien to me."
Like her fictional forebears, Ann is severely punished -- not for illicit love, the old transgression of female rulebreakers, but for shooting two police officers who were acting in a threatening manner toward her black lover. The most convincing and moving portrayal of Ann comes in an account of her time in prison written by a fellow inmate, a black woman also doing time for murder. We read this nearly at the end of the novel, and this last deviation from George's point of view is welcome because finally Nunez comes up with a narrative voice that seems authentic and compelling: "The way I see it now, she was damned if she did, damned if she didn't. Nobody liked the fact that she came from an upper-class background, as far from most prisoners as you can get. But nobody liked it either that she wanted to be treated like she came from the bottom. She didn't understand that, by asking for this, she was actually putting herself above everyone. Who did she think she was?" Very swiftly we get to know this narrator, the pseudonymous Olympia Underwood, but neither Ann Drayton nor Georgette George ever quite adds up. ·
Joyce Johnson is the author of the memoirs "Missing Men" and "Minor Characters."
