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asianamlitfans2009-03-15 10:49 pm
pylduck.livejournal.com) wrote in asianamlitfans2009-03-15 10:49 pm
Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind
I just finished up Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (FSG, 2006), a longer novel at 375 pages than my usual fare but definitely worth the time.
Nunez makes for an interesting figure for Asian American literary studies in a number of ways. Biographically, she is mixed-race. Fictionally, most of her novels stray from expectations that non-white authors write about "their people." Furthermore, her characters do not seem primarily to deal with "identity" or "race." (These points are of course total over-simplifications of Asian American literature as a whole, but they still function as starting points for most conversations....) I have only read her first novel and this, her fifth. But from what I understand, only her first novel approximates the expectations of ethnic writers--A Feather on the Breath of God features a mixed-race protagonist whose father is Chinese (via Panama) and mother is German American. With her other novels, then, is there any point in reading Nunez as an Asian American writer? What use does such a categorization have for making sense of her writing? Is it useful to read her against or alongside other Asian American writers? On these questions, I don't have too much to say in this review but make some half-formed suggestions at the end for including Nunez's latest novel in discussions of Asian American literature.
The Last of her Kind features Georgette George, a white woman from the working poor of an upstate New York town who narrates her life and that of her college roommate, Dooley Ann Drayton, a white woman from the well-to-do socialite class of New York City/Connecticut. Told from the perspective of our contemporary moment, the narrative is most amazing for its evocation of a different time--the 1960s and 1970s--when revolutionary thought and countercultures held sway. George, who often goes by the male version of her name which is also her surname, punctuates her telling at many moments with self-reflective comments about the act of writing down this story as if in the genre of a memoir. Explorations of writing itself as an act of creation, of remembering, and of communicating make the narrative a richly-layered one in which the novel-memoir reminds us of the artful quality of constructed narratives. I, for one, love novels that feature writers or other artists as a kind of meta-commentary on writing and art. Towards the end of the novel, George notes,
But more than offering beautiful moments of meditation on the act of writing, the novel opens up questions about the social movements that shook American culture in the 1960s and 1970s, especially as they affected people in widely divergent ways. George's roommate Ann becomes the central figure through which many issues about social justice emerge. Ann repudiates the privilege accorded to her based on her race and class background, feeling in fact a great shame or anger at being part of the ruling, imperialist race (paraphrased from her own description). She is a puzzling figure to most people in her world--no less her parents than imprisoned black women--and highlights some of the contradictions that characterized the youth movements of the time. Many of the most vociferous advocates of radical change to the status quo (combatting racism, sexism, and imperialism) were themselves from well-to-do backgrounds, carrying the privilege of a safe childhood and higher education. Ann notes this contradiction in the movements and tries throughout her life to position herself always at the same level of those who have the least. Such a move, of course, raises the hackles of many black and poor people who see her simply as slumming, pretending to be someone she is not.
In addition to sketching the countercultural moment, the novel also traces how American culture moved into the 1980s with a vengeance and cracked down on the drug and sexual excesses of the previous decades. To my surprise, the novel does so primarily by turning to the site of a women's prison. Many of the ideas broached in the second half of the novel tread the ground of material I have been teaching about prison abolition--for example, about how the prison population has grown exponentially since the late 1970s, how prisons are not really about rehabilitation but punishment, how recidivism is a huge issue, and how the prison system in general is merely an inadequate bandage for larger social problems such as poverty and poor educational systems.
Ultimately, though, the novel still is about the two women at the center--George and Ann--and it is George's persona as it emerges in her recollections of her life and the fierce figure of Ann that propels the narrative. I don't want to give away too many details of the narrative because much of the force of how Nunez constructs the "memoir" is in the deliberate postponement of particular stories. George ultimately comes across as a fully-realized character who is neither unreliable nor unlikable but also not a flawless heroine. It is, in fact, her sense of being inadequate when compared to her friend Ann--less passionate, less principled, less daring--that opens up many of her memories and offers her self-portrait in the mirror of a vastly different woman.
Now for the few half-formed thoughts on how to read this novel as an Asian Americanist: Aside from references to the Vietnam War (George's brother Guy is a veteran of that war) and a visit some characters make to China later, there is little in the way of Asia or Asian America to ground this novel. And yet, these two brief references are enough to suggest some readings that would more fully situate the novel in questions of racial and anti-imperialist politics of the time. To what extent were the lives of white women--from both the poor and rich communities--re-scripted in the context of larger geopolitical forces that brought the United States into contact with Asian countries?
The novel's interest in the radical politics and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s suggests a link with another recent novel by a mixed-race Asian American writer: Susan Choi's American Woman. I have not read it yet (perhaps it will be my next review!), but I understand that it features an Asian American protagonist and takes up a fictional version of the real-life Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress of a newspaper fortune and most well-known figure of Stockholm Syndrome (where a captive takes on the ideology of her captors). Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s was a huge media story, and her taking up of the SLA's struggle was every white, well-to-do family's nightmare of how the radical social movements might brainwash their children. Nunez's novel juxtaposes Ann's embrace of blackness and the poor with the figure of Hearst. Ann, however, is appalled by Hearst and sees in her not a mirror of herself but a rich, white woman who only cares for herself. A reading of Choi and Nunez's novels together might be interesting for considering how the two deal with racial politics and the presence of women in these movements (often conflicted). Additionally, it might be fruitful to explore why these novelists are turning to those decades of American culture for their fictions. Is there something about early-twenty-first century American culture that cries out for a kind of nostalgia for that countercultural era?
Nunez makes for an interesting figure for Asian American literary studies in a number of ways. Biographically, she is mixed-race. Fictionally, most of her novels stray from expectations that non-white authors write about "their people." Furthermore, her characters do not seem primarily to deal with "identity" or "race." (These points are of course total over-simplifications of Asian American literature as a whole, but they still function as starting points for most conversations....) I have only read her first novel and this, her fifth. But from what I understand, only her first novel approximates the expectations of ethnic writers--A Feather on the Breath of God features a mixed-race protagonist whose father is Chinese (via Panama) and mother is German American. With her other novels, then, is there any point in reading Nunez as an Asian American writer? What use does such a categorization have for making sense of her writing? Is it useful to read her against or alongside other Asian American writers? On these questions, I don't have too much to say in this review but make some half-formed suggestions at the end for including Nunez's latest novel in discussions of Asian American literature.
The Last of her Kind features Georgette George, a white woman from the working poor of an upstate New York town who narrates her life and that of her college roommate, Dooley Ann Drayton, a white woman from the well-to-do socialite class of New York City/Connecticut. Told from the perspective of our contemporary moment, the narrative is most amazing for its evocation of a different time--the 1960s and 1970s--when revolutionary thought and countercultures held sway. George, who often goes by the male version of her name which is also her surname, punctuates her telling at many moments with self-reflective comments about the act of writing down this story as if in the genre of a memoir. Explorations of writing itself as an act of creation, of remembering, and of communicating make the narrative a richly-layered one in which the novel-memoir reminds us of the artful quality of constructed narratives. I, for one, love novels that feature writers or other artists as a kind of meta-commentary on writing and art. Towards the end of the novel, George notes,
I stopped keeping a journal long ago. But for many years of my life there have been periods when I did keep a journal, and those journals still exist. They can be found in the same cedar trunk with my other papers and documents. And yet I have never once taken them out. I have never had the desire to go open one of them, to check my memory against what is recorded there. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I opened one of my old journals, and I'm inclined to think I might never open one again. I wrote them, I kept them, but I have no curiosity, not the least interest in what they might tell me about the past today. Whatever happened, I prefer to re-create it. Even at the inevitable risk of getting some things wrong, I want this to be a work of pure memory and imagination. Instinct tells me that, in the end, what I'll have made will be closer to the truth.I see this moment and others like it, too, as a kind of jab at contemporary American publishing culture's obsession with the memoir form and the recurring outrages at "fake" memoirs (whether wholly fabricated or filled with slanderous, factual errors). Indeed, George's own sister Solange makes peace with her mental illness by turning to writing (and medication), first writing a tell-all memoir that paints their mother in lurid hues.
But more than offering beautiful moments of meditation on the act of writing, the novel opens up questions about the social movements that shook American culture in the 1960s and 1970s, especially as they affected people in widely divergent ways. George's roommate Ann becomes the central figure through which many issues about social justice emerge. Ann repudiates the privilege accorded to her based on her race and class background, feeling in fact a great shame or anger at being part of the ruling, imperialist race (paraphrased from her own description). She is a puzzling figure to most people in her world--no less her parents than imprisoned black women--and highlights some of the contradictions that characterized the youth movements of the time. Many of the most vociferous advocates of radical change to the status quo (combatting racism, sexism, and imperialism) were themselves from well-to-do backgrounds, carrying the privilege of a safe childhood and higher education. Ann notes this contradiction in the movements and tries throughout her life to position herself always at the same level of those who have the least. Such a move, of course, raises the hackles of many black and poor people who see her simply as slumming, pretending to be someone she is not.
In addition to sketching the countercultural moment, the novel also traces how American culture moved into the 1980s with a vengeance and cracked down on the drug and sexual excesses of the previous decades. To my surprise, the novel does so primarily by turning to the site of a women's prison. Many of the ideas broached in the second half of the novel tread the ground of material I have been teaching about prison abolition--for example, about how the prison population has grown exponentially since the late 1970s, how prisons are not really about rehabilitation but punishment, how recidivism is a huge issue, and how the prison system in general is merely an inadequate bandage for larger social problems such as poverty and poor educational systems.
Ultimately, though, the novel still is about the two women at the center--George and Ann--and it is George's persona as it emerges in her recollections of her life and the fierce figure of Ann that propels the narrative. I don't want to give away too many details of the narrative because much of the force of how Nunez constructs the "memoir" is in the deliberate postponement of particular stories. George ultimately comes across as a fully-realized character who is neither unreliable nor unlikable but also not a flawless heroine. It is, in fact, her sense of being inadequate when compared to her friend Ann--less passionate, less principled, less daring--that opens up many of her memories and offers her self-portrait in the mirror of a vastly different woman.
Now for the few half-formed thoughts on how to read this novel as an Asian Americanist: Aside from references to the Vietnam War (George's brother Guy is a veteran of that war) and a visit some characters make to China later, there is little in the way of Asia or Asian America to ground this novel. And yet, these two brief references are enough to suggest some readings that would more fully situate the novel in questions of racial and anti-imperialist politics of the time. To what extent were the lives of white women--from both the poor and rich communities--re-scripted in the context of larger geopolitical forces that brought the United States into contact with Asian countries?
The novel's interest in the radical politics and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s suggests a link with another recent novel by a mixed-race Asian American writer: Susan Choi's American Woman. I have not read it yet (perhaps it will be my next review!), but I understand that it features an Asian American protagonist and takes up a fictional version of the real-life Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress of a newspaper fortune and most well-known figure of Stockholm Syndrome (where a captive takes on the ideology of her captors). Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s was a huge media story, and her taking up of the SLA's struggle was every white, well-to-do family's nightmare of how the radical social movements might brainwash their children. Nunez's novel juxtaposes Ann's embrace of blackness and the poor with the figure of Hearst. Ann, however, is appalled by Hearst and sees in her not a mirror of herself but a rich, white woman who only cares for herself. A reading of Choi and Nunez's novels together might be interesting for considering how the two deal with racial politics and the presence of women in these movements (often conflicted). Additionally, it might be fruitful to explore why these novelists are turning to those decades of American culture for their fictions. Is there something about early-twenty-first century American culture that cries out for a kind of nostalgia for that countercultural era?
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I also think there's something to your last question about the times that we're in right now romanticizing and looking back on the counterculture era of the 60s and 70s with nostalgia. I was thinking the other day, after The New School and NYU's recent sit-ins and protests, that we are returning to a more activist and revolutionary period in history. Just the other day when I was on MTSU's campus for my French exam, there was a protest with banners and microphones and shouting in the quad about the elimination of majors slated for next year. When I was beginning college in 2003, and everyone was heralding the return of the 80s, no one would have done that. In fact, K College eliminated their education major with only a few grumblings from those students it affected. Now that the 80s has come and gone, and we're returning to a 70s/90s groove, I am excited to see what happens in the literature, on campus, and in the news!
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I am 1/3 of the way through The Last of Her Kind, but something about it strikes me as very Asian American in spite of white characters being the central focus. It's not that I don't buy these women as possible real white women, but some of the things that George says in her narration strike me as things that aren't at the forefront of white women's minds, even white women who could have lived with a figure like Ann. But, I am definitely working on my analysis as I read in order to write my own review here too!