The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez

Abstract

The Steadfast Attention of Sigrid Nunez Tara K. Menon (bio) A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 1995)Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez (Harper, 1998)For Rouenna by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2001)The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez (Picador, 2007)Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2010)Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2014)The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2018)What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead, 2020) In 2018, Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for The Friend, her rousing novel about a woman who, after the suicide of her friend, finds herself saddled with grief and a two-hundred-pound Great Dane. Nunez is no stranger to prestigious prizes (she is the winner of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship) or to critical acclaim (each of her seven previous books was widely lauded), but the combination [End Page 640] of this award and the universally rapturous reviews of the novel finally found her, at the age of sixty-seven, the wide readership she deserves. (In my opinion, Nicholas Ortega’s gorgeous cover design with its regal Harlequin Great Dane and beach-ball-bright colors deserves partial credit for the novel’s commercial success.) Her modest acceptance speech at the awards ceremony displayed the same qualities — honesty, humor, warmth — that give the novel its appeal: I was lucky enough as a child to have had a mother and teachers who taught me that whatever happened in life, however bad things might get, I could always escape by reading a book. I was lucky enough to keep on meeting them, people who believed that reading and writing were the best things a person could do with her life. And to learn what Alan Bennett was getting at when he said that for a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because however dreadful, it may be of use. I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it was something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room. How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible, to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time. And tonight, how happy I am to feel like a part of the world. She was faultlessly gracious, but listening closely you got the sense she might have preferred to be at home with a book. Nunez views writing as an exalted vocation; it requires a lifetime of dedication and as few distractions as possible. She didn’t marry or have children, she supplements her writing income with adjunct teaching, [End Page 641] and you will not find her on social media. She is, in other words, the kind of writer whose demise the man at the center of The Friend laments. The man, who is the unnamed narrator’s friend, mentor, and onetime lover, is addressed as “you” throughout the novel. “You” is a writer and teacher who is full of contempt for his students. He rails against everything: the commercial ambitions of aspiring young writers, the desire for “safe spaces,” accusations about writing as cultural appropriation, and, especially, complaints about his inappropriate behavior in the classroom. For a man who has spent his life sleeping with his students, this political correctness thing really has gone too far. The old-fashioned word for “you” is womanizer; some might say shameless lech. Today, whatever you choose to call him, he’d be the subject of a Title IX investigation. For what it’s worth, Nunez doesn’t paint the young women as agency-less victims of his advances. Instead, the many willing participants are in it for “the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees.” (The novel teems with astute sociological observations.) The narrator paints a scathing picture of an out-of-touch and endlessly self-pitying man, but you also get the sense that she shares his dismay about the fragile youth, his contempt for self-obsessed, gossip-mongering...