What Are You Going Through

June 8, 2020
Nunez’s deceptively casual and ultimately fierce work (after the National Book Award-winning The Friend) ambles through a range of digressions toward a plot involving euthanasia. At the beginning, the unnamed narrator has traveled to visit her unnamed old friend in a hospital, where the friend is being treated for cancer. But before the narrator describes the visit, she details her experience at a depressing lecture by a pretentious journalist—who turns out to be her ex. This side trip involved an Airbnb, where “a cat had been promised,” but after she checked out, having never seen the cat, she learned it had died. Eventually, she reaches the hospital, and the tension picks up. Her friend is planning to kill herself before she’s too debilitated, and two other friends have refused to help. Will the narrator? As the two women make and implement their plan, Nunez studies the intersection of friendship and morality. Much of the novel’s action is internal, as the attention of its judgmental, withholding narrator flicks from books to movies to sharp-edged thoughts about the people she encounters, offering plenty of surprises. Those willing to jump along with her should be tantalized by the provocative questions she raises.

July 1, 2020
A woman is enlisted to help a dying friend commit suicide in Nunez's latest novel, which--true to form--is short, sharp, and quietly brutal. Nunez returns to many of the topics she mined in The Friend, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018: the meaning of life, the nature of death, writing, the purpose of friendship. This is hardly a criticism; in fact, what else is there? The novel, spare and elegant and immediate, often feeling closer to essay than fiction, is as much about its unnamed narrator's thoughts as the events of her life (is there a difference?). To the extent there is a "plot"--less a "plot" than "circumstances to inspire thinking"--it is this: A writer in late middle age goes to another city to visit an old friend who is sick. Later, when it becomes clear that the friend's condition is terminal, she enlists our narrator to assist her in ending her life. Not to help with the actual dying part--"I know what to do," she quips. "It's not complicated"--but rather with everything that should happen in the interim. What she wants is to rent a house for the end, nothing special, "just somewhere I can be peaceful and do the last things that need to be done." And she would like our narrator to be there. "I can't be completely alone," she explains. "What if something goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong?" She will, she promises "make it as much fun as possible." Reluctantly, the narrator agrees. Most of the novel, though, is not about this, or at least not directly. Instead, the narrator considers her past and her present. She attends the doomsday climate lecture of an ex-boyfriend. She thinks about an unpleasant neighbor. She recounts, delightfully and in great detail, the plot of a murder mystery she is reading and then circles back to the trauma of aging, for everyone, and especially for women. The novel is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.

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Starred review from August 1, 2020
The narrator of Nunez's eighth novel is out of town to see an old friend battling aggressive cancer with middling odds; in the evening, she attends a lecture on the world's bleak future, delivered by a well-informed and decidedly unoptimistic writer: her ex. Later, having stopped treatment, the friend visits the narrator in New York and, in a bar they'd frequented as young roommates, surprises her with a proposal: accompany her on a getaway during which she'll take pills to end her life. In this richly interiorized novel, following Nunez's National Book Award-winning The Friend (2018), most dialogue is volleyed without quotes, putting readers themselves in continuous conversation with the narrator. In her friend's shoes, she'd want the same thing; as herself, she's staggered by what she's agreed to bear. The friends' conversations, and their in-every-way-incomparable trip, provoke reflections on the impossible reconciliation of youth and old age, even within oneself; the inevitability that everything becomes a memory, perhaps misremembered, perhaps unbelievable. "I am talking about that taint of the surreal that besmears so much of our vision of the past." With both compassion and joy, Nunez contemplates how we survive life's certain suffering, and don't, with words and one another.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2020

"Women's stories are often sad stories" opens the fourth chapter in this new novel from National Book Award winner Nunez (The Friend), and it is an apt descriptor for what you will find here. The narrator (none of the characters is named) is a writer in late middle age who travels to visit a friend undergoing cancer treatment. What serves as plot is the narrator's continued comfort and support for her friend once her diagnosis becomes terminal, but mostly the narration is an accounting of various stories and reflections she hears from her friend and others about their lives, loves, and regrets. Much as in Rachel Cusk's recent work, the narrator is a conduit and sounding board for the stories of others. The believability and relatability of these stories are contrasted with a sensational thriller the narrator is reading at the Airbnb where she is staying. VERDICT Deeply empathetic without being sentimental, this novel explores women's lives, their choices, and how they support one another, particularly when they don't have spouses or children or those relationships have become strained. Highly recommended for readers who favor emotional resonance over escapism during difficult times. [See Prepub Alert, 2/24/20.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

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