Trapped Radicals

By Emily Gordon

In Sigrid Nunez's idiosyncratic, provocative and sublimely confident new novel, "The Last of Her Kind," history and fiction are intermingled in a fable it would be unwise to ignore. In this precise meditation on race, class, drugs, the haunting power of friends and family members, and the hazards of loyalty and privilege, Nunez takes apart the story of a kind of life in the 1960s like a still-live mine.

The only child of a wealthy Connecticut family, Ann Drayton and her freshman roommate, Georgette George, the book's narrator, meet at Barnard College in 1968. The undergraduates in "The Last of Her Kind," mostly upper-middle-class white women and their friends, are radicalized, charged with righteous energy and blinded by misguided envy. Ann joins Students for a Democratic Society, scorns "bourgeois affectations" and fails to understand why the girls at the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters cafeteria table don't welcome her joining them. She's vocal about her regret that she was not born poor and disenfranchised. By the end of the novel, Ann will get her wish. Is that for the best? Nunez gives us the gift of deciding that for ourselves.

In this large-themed novel, Nunez examines not just campus radicals like Ann—only one of the "kinds" referred to in the title—but Georgette's abusive mother and runaway hippie sister, Solange; Ann's old-fashioned, anxious parents and her African-American teacher boyfriend; music and publishing big shots, and others. Through meticulously structured narrative, Nunez brings them through the '70s and '80s to the immediate present, from which a sober Georgette tells their story.

Many of the characters in "The Last of Her Kind" become trapped in their own myths about liberation. Georgette, whose family really is poor, never quite escapes the abuse and neglect that shaped her. One of the best things about this deeply intelligent novel is its direct confrontation of the truth that family, like trauma, close friendship and overpowering love, never really leaves us—it comes back like a song, endlessly repeating. "A woman in love lies to herself," Georgette writes, and that phrase can be applied to the novel as a whole. Students in the '60s loved their causes; Solange loves a crass Mick Jagger; Georgette loves Ann, and they are all disappointed. Ann and Georgette are only in college for the first section of the novel, which documents the friendship and falling out of intense young women wonderfully; the middle section, in which Georgette finds her way in publishing, will recall Mary Cantwell's memoir "Manhattan, When I Was Young." The final section takes place in prison.

Were the more tragic consequences of breaking out of conventionality and fear—the murder at Altamont, a character's sexual assault, bad LSD trips—fate or punishment or martyrdom or something else? Nunez has us consider the culpability of not just the characters here but of Jagger himself, the newspapers, parents, schools, drug dealers, witnesses and observers, and so on. As she looks back on her life, Georgette reflects, "I believe you have to reach a certain age before you understand how much life really is like a novel, with patterns and leitmotifs and turning points, and guns that must go off and people who must return before the ending." Nunez makes that entirely believable.

Throughout the often very moving story, Nunez has Georgette interrupt her own narrative of Ann's progress through college-dropoutdom into a perpetually protesting adulthood with quotations, song lyrics and other facts. It makes for a slightly didactic, but surprisingly pleasant effect. Georgette's own story, which at first seems to be a distraction from Ann's tale, becomes increasingly central—and increasingly the more interesting one. Nunez is a subtle writer, and there are many flawless observations: "She made me want to hide my hands," recalls Georgette of Ann's upper-crust mother. It says a lot about Nunez's skill as a writer that her evocation of a particularly harrowing LSD trip both serves the story brilliantly and is absolutely imaginable.

What Nunez is aiming at, and achieves, is a document of an era through characters who begin to seem like historical icons whose names we should remember. It's responsible, feminist, uncompromising and hugely informative but never patronizing. She shows us the crowds and the big ideas, then zeroes in on the individuals within them, conferring on them nobility and intelligence. Nunez has created a book that feels both porous—there is room for our own accounts of these times—and like the discovery of a crucial document, the riveting archive of the lives of the last of all kinds of dreamers.

This review of Nunez's novel was in Sunday's Newsday. I don't know how long it's been since I've read a contemporary novel that was genuinely free of errors—typos, odd spacing, brand names spelled wrong, weird punctuation. Three cheers for FSG for keeping proofreaders off the streets! (For publishing superb books, too.) In the review above, I fixed a phrase in the penultimate sentence that got dropped inadvertently in the editing process. Not a euphemism for "I fought to keep it but I lost," I swear!

(Published in Newsday, January 8, 2006)