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.

A powerful sense of intimacy and immediacy come through in Hillary Huber's narration of this meditative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of THE FRIEND. The story centers on an unnamed woman who travels to visit a cancer-stricken friend. The friend asks her to arrange matters after she commits suicide with a euthanasia drug. The complexities of euthanasia are highlighted in Huber's expressive portrayals of these women. Interspersed with this debate are ruminations on aging, societal expectations of women, and antinatalism. There is an abundance of challenging material here, which even includes a short episode of a cat's anthropomorphic thoughts vividly conveyed by Huber. This provocative audiobook can be devoured in one sitting but may be best appreciated in short listens. M.J. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine