Hello, Radio Readers! I’m Jane Holwerda for High Plains Public Radio. About our 2023 Summer Read. You know, every week in June and through most of July, Radio Readers have talked about books worthy of sharing, and now we have an incredible book list. Do you have time for one more recommendation?
It’s rather a quirky and recent novel, written by an author who’d labored in relative obscurity up to winning a National Book Award in 2018 for her 8th book. Titled The Friend, the novel is about a woman who inherits a large dog from a friend who died. That book shares much with the author’s more recent novel What Are You Going Through, about a woman taking care of a dying friend. Not exactly sequels, says the author Sigrid Nunez, but the novels do go together: aging and death are preoccupations of both. In her 70’s, Nunez notes that “At a certain age there is only one subject.” I figure no matter our age, to collect perspectives on how it all ends can only be helpful…right?
The title What Are You Going Through is borrowed from the early 20th century philosopher and activist Simone Weil. The full quotation, an epigraph in the novel, goes like this: “The Love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’” Narrated from the first-person point of view of a woman whose biography sounds much like that of Nunez herself, a woman well into that age of social invisibility, living alone and working at her craft, stretching the ends to make them meet. She recounts stories told by people she meets in her daily rounds, while waiting in line, at the gym, lunch with friends. With some ironic detachment, she compares these stories of failed relationships to those of novels, music, and film, comparisons which make the stories she’s been told seem, well, small, even a bit whiny.
Until the novel focuses on what happens when the narrator decides to assist a friend’s euthanasia. She and the dying friend share a house and confidences ranging from trivial to substantive. They argue, they joke, they are quiet together. The euthanasia doesn’t come off quite as planned: the friend forgets the medication with which to overdose, both enjoy the well-appointed and spacious B&B on the Maine coastline too much to leave, that is, until a weird plumbing catastrophe necessitates returning to small city apartments. Basically, we see, once again, life with a capital “L” rolling over the individual. This is messy and it’s unfair, the narrator explains. But what choice is there but to deal? We see the paradox Nunez has illustrated: the times we try to love are the saddest and the happiest times of our lives; all lives pass from memory to oblivion anyway, so…so what if we fail? The important thing is to try, to ask and to listen to what those around us are going though. Like the proverb says, we are all just walking each other home, after all.
So, from my reading list to yours: Sigrid Nunez’ wise and witty and oftentimes amusing and always deep-hearted What Are You Going Through. You can post comments or just choose an emoji about all the summer book bytes at Radio Readers on Facebook. Because you know what? Like life, good things come to an end and so we’re wrapping up this Summer Read, though of course reading and our conversations will continue.
In just a few more weeks, High Plains Public Radio will be back on air for the Fall 2023 Read: Wisdom of the Natural World.
Stay tuned-in, wired and ready!
For HPPR Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda, from Dodge City, Kansas.
