The Last of Her Kind: A novel by Sigrid Nunez (Picador)
A Non-Review by J. Stefan-Cole
Sigrid Nunez's fifth novel, The Last of Her Kind, reissued 2007, Picador, is the story of two women colliding in the culture wars of the nineteen sixties and seventies. George-short for Georgette-is a Barnard freshman in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive that unraveled LBJ's Vietnam War, and saw Martin Luther King assassinated in April, followed by Robert Kennedy in June. Throw in pot, acid, hippies, race riots and the feminist movement and you have the cauldron George steps into when she arrives at New York City's Port Authority Bus Terminal. Five minutes later she is robbed by a guy who offered to help. Then she meets her roommate.
Dooley Drayton, known as Ann, is a rich kid from Connecticut who'd asked to be paired in the dorm with a person of color, but got George, white-trash breakout from upstate New York, instead. The Dooleys had been Southern slave owners. Ann dropped her given name to atone, longing to prostrate herself before the underprivileged. She assumes George comes pre-packaged with outrage. She's wrong, and never figures out there are no necessary heroics to being poor or black or female.
Ann mercilessly berates her parents for the crimes of being moneyed and oblivious. In a deliciously awkward scene, Ann drags George to a posh restaurant she would never dream of entering on her own. There, a wide-eyed and hungry George meets the Drayton parents. After tossing a handful of verbal grenades at Mom and Dad, Ann refuses to eat, which precludes George from eating. Livid, Ann drags George back outside, only to leave her on the sidewalk confused as to what just happened. George's mother, abandoned by George's father, with three kids to feed on a school cafeteria worker's pay, is hellish. Mrs. Drayton is benign royalty by comparison. The contrast eludes Ann, unacquainted as she is with complex emotional textures and firsthand hardship.
In a memoir she never intends anyone to read, Georgette explains Ann: "She believed that some of the chains in which men everywhere found themselves were those emotional ones that prevented them from giving voice to their suffering and letting others know what they needed. This was a favorite theme, a cornerstone of Ann's philosophy of life, and I could never hear it without thinking, Don't let the pack know you're wounded, which was a kind of motto where I came from." Their clashes-bystander and activist thrown together-become a microcosm of the clashes taking place in America. Ann turns politically hardcore, an amalgam of a Kathy Boudin, Patricia Hearst and 'Squeekie' Fromme. Her dream of bringing justice to America's sprawling underclass twists inevitably out of shape because, good as some of her intentions are, she lacks the compassion of a Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King.
George admires Ann but grows increasingly bewildered and uncomfortable and drops out of school. When she takes a job with a fashion magazine, Ann's disdain is palpable. Surrounded by the swirl of events, George remains remarkably untouched. Childhood blunted her. When she is raped and given a dose of heroin by one of Ann's radical cohorts, encouraged to pass out rather than think, she goes along. The rapist was black after all, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, partly her own fault; what the whites have done to blacks and so on. The sexual revolution cancelled some of the usual strictures and Nunez brings this hidden side of liberation strikingly to light. Years later, explaining the rape in a discussion with her daughter's friends, George is told she's in denial, rape is rape. She says it happened in a different time, but the gen Xers don't buy it.
Impossible too to comprehend the violence that lands Ann in prison. She was among the last of a radical kind—until the current breed of terrorist arrived—to sanction any means necessary to achieve an end. It took a recession, Ronald Regan and the reactionary rise of the right to fizzle the American cultural revolution—the one that would not be televised. Nunez's book illustrates a culture that became anathema to Evangelical Christians. If the portrait is dark, it is also of a time that addressed racial and gender inequality, took sex out of the closet, and put hypocrisy on the front page. Some of the then-forming leaders of today wished the era had never happened. Freedom had become a little too free: women burning bras, abortion legalized, pothead flower power and the politics of socialism, corporations become a dirty word. (The good old days.)
If the revolution was doomed, its demise came in part from within. Scenes like the LSD trip George takes with her unbalanced, hippie sister Solange zoom in on some counter unreality: "Everyone always said the same things. Oh, the colors, the colors, and it was like you were seeing everything for the first time, and if you didn't fight it, you would lose your ego and find bliss." Can't have that in the most powerful nation in the history of the world; psychedelic soul searching out, aggression in.
George's passivity ultimately leads her to motherhood and the bland middle class. Her memoir captures a past she barely lived while living through it. Ann burns out never realizing the harm she's done in the name of social justice. Sigrid Nunez has understood a critical American moment, and she brings the counterculture back to us in full, living color; an era that was the last of its kind. If you missed it, here is your chance to take the trip.
©2007 J. Stefan-Cole
