Reviewed by Thalia Aurinko-Mostow
2.16.07

The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, is much denser than her previous work – almost 400 pages – but given the three decades covered, the political and social changes occurring within the time, and the close reporting of not one, but two women’s lives during these thirty years, Nunez has written a compact and precise work of fiction.

Ann Drayton and Georgette George meet as college roommates at Barnard in the fall of 1968. (Nunez herself attended Barnard, graduating in 1972.) Georgette, known mainly as George, comes to the city from a small blue-collar town in upstate New York, where she explains, “People drank to keep their bodies warm, their brains numb.” Ann on the other hand, was born into a wealthy family from Connecticut, and spends most of the novel trying to escape her “white privilege.” She changes Dooley Drayton, her given name, to Ann as soon as she arrives on campus, explaining to George that, “It [Dooley] stank of bourgeois affection. And worse. It was a family name, and the part of her family that had borne the name, somewhere from her mother’s side, had been from the South…and were descended from plantation owners.” When Ann first moves in with George, she expresses her disappointment in not having a black roommate, after having requested “to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own.”

Although the two girls don’t share similar backgrounds, they are both looking for companionship and find it in one another. To George, their relationship was, “one single, endless, smoky conversation, interrupted by classes and a little sleep.” Of course this cannot last forever, and after two years, both Ann and George decide to drop out of school. Just before she drops out, George faces a series of unsettling incidents; her sister, Solange, runs away from home, George is raped while walking one evening in Riverside Park, and is later is given heroin by Sasha, a radical friend of Ann’s who will shortly after blow up a house in Greenwich Village. No one event is given more weight than another, making it difficult to determine the ultimate impact on George’s wellbeing. The rape, for example, is glossed over with only minor detached descriptions: “What was it like? It was like being mounted by a dog or some other animal. There was the slaver, the panting, the animal smell, but no speech, no eye contact, nothing personal.”

After school, George’s life is narrated in brief flashes. The death of her mother, birth of her children and two marriages all move with forward without much reflection. It becomes increasingly hard to feel for such a detached character, and George becomes less and less compelling as the novel progress. However, the reader’s distance from George works to the novel’s advantage as it highlights the significance of Ann’s later arrest, and focuses the readers’ attention on the events that follow.

After the young women part ways, the relationship that has been the novel’s driving force crumbles and prompts a loss of momentum in the narrative. George begins working at Visage, a fashion magazine, while Ann falls in love with Kwame Kwesi, a teacher and one-time revolutionary who lives in Harlem. She moves in him, finally getting her wish of having a black roommate. It is also at this point in the text that Solange, George’s younger runaway sister, is more or less found, materializing at George’s door one rainy night. The only baggage Solange carries is the story of her survival, a love for Mick Jagger, and the beginning of a never-ending psychiatric battle. It is here when the novel really loses speed. A letter Solange has written to Mick emerges in the text soon after she does, and though only three pages in length, it is abrupt and curious enough to take the reader out of the narrative. The obsession with Jagger does nothing to advance the plot, and if anything, builds a caricature Nunez had thus avoided: the acid popping, hitchhiking, music obsessed 1960’s female. This is not the only place where a tangential letter of this sort appears.

After Ann is arrested for killing a cop and sent to prison, an interview her lawyer gives The Village Voice appears. The interview does not provide one detail that hasn’t been presented before (beyond briefly addressing a rumor of an affair between Ann and him) and serves mostly as a platform for Nunez to showcase her ability to write in a variety of voices and personalities.
It should be noted that not all of these additional narratives negatively influence to the plot. The novel ends with a personal essay written by a fellow inmate and friend of Ann’s from prison. This brief memoir bridges the gap between what we picture Ann’s sentence to be like from reading George’s description, and the reality of her time and work in the correctional facility. Nunez is a master of altering tone and rhythm to jump from one voice to another, and though her earlier attempts fail to move the plot along, the essay at the novel’s end more than makes up for the earlier digressions. The voice shift is extreme, sharp and purposeful, yet proves to be some of the most moving language in the book: “She’s not wearing any shoes or socks, and it hits me how small her bare feet are and how white they are, though the bottoms are a little darker, from dirt. And she’s crying.”
George finally fills out emotionally when she describes a brief love affair she had with an unlikely character. This is the only time Nunez uses a third-person voice, and it is for this passage that Nunez saves her most eloquent writing, more specifically for George’s descriptions of dance. Ann’s parents had been patrons of New York City Ballet, and over time and a quite surprising turn of events, George begins to frequent the ballet as well. As in her debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, Nunez shows that ballet is the epitome of lyricism and beauty, saving some of her richest and most provocative language for the passages where Vienna Waltzes, the Balanchine ballet, is described: “The music stayed with her. The vision of couples spinning endlessly in each other’s arms. The swooning music, man and woman looking burningly into each other’s faces, into each other’s eyes, as they dipped and turned and flew, fabulous birds in a courtship ritual, lost in the delirium of love.”

The Last of Her Kind is really a story of female friendship. Ann and George are very distinct characters whose differences do not change the impact they have on one another’s life, though it seems that Ann’s influence on George was much greater than that of George on Ann. The Last of Her Kind is really Ann’s book, but George’s longing for her is a constant reminder of the few years they were close. Both girls share their first real bond with another person during their late-night talks. One of Nunez’s characters best captures the powerful pull of women’s intimacy in the following joke: “Two women who are imprisoned together in the same cell for 25 years are released on the same day. Before they go their separate ways, they hang around outside the prison gate and talk for an hour.”