Life is short, it is said, though not as short as the vast majority of novels would have us believe. Youth is the plaything of the novel—certainly of the bildungsroman, with its lost illusions and great expectations, and of the midlife novel, whose characters cast off the shackles of adulthood to claim the symbolic passions of an earlier age. Even novels about growing old look back more intently than they look down at the flesh and blood of seventy or eighty. In Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein” and Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal,” the spectre of death quickens and focusses memory. It compels reminiscences, flashbacks; drives wheezy little men into the arms of younger women whose beauty and vitality they cling to like Odysseus to his rock. There such novels hang, too, amid the misty romance of the past, fearful that the red-hot glow of rapture no longer waits faithfully on the horizon. Or as a character in Sigrid Nunez’s “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead) says, “But after a certain age, that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t happen, it can’t happen.”
Nunez’s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez’s prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, “a female of a certain age,” keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four, the grandmother of six”; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features—his “stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince the look of entitlement “that comes to many older white men at a certain age.” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:
For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator’s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks “like a frightened toddler,” she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an “Other,” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. “As men see it, a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, “The Coming of Age.” “When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” adding that women often internalized other people’s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book’s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, “a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through.
Nunez’s novel wants to be an exception that proves the rule. Its task is an unenviable one: to strip old age of whatever illusions the novel has imparted to it; to verify the truth and significance of aging and dying by turning the cool white light of Nunez’s prose on every vein, every wrinkle. The plot is simple, wandering, and loosely associative: an unnamed, first-person narrator, “a female of a certain age,” keeps the company of a friend who is dying of cancer. In the beginning, the friend is in the hospital in a college town. Unlike most college towns, this one is curiously devoid of anyone young. The people the narrator encounters are not merely old but aging badly, with a self-consciousness that makes them pitiful, impious, and occasionally vulgar. The host of her Airbnb is “a retired librarian, a widow,” a “mother of four, the grandmother of six”; she has a fat, slack face, and is ashamed to be grieving the death of her only companion, her cat. The narrator attends a talk about environmental collapse delivered by a famous writer, a man whose arrogant features—his “stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze”—evince the look of entitlement “that comes to many older white men at a certain age.” The woman who introduces his talk is a professor, also “a familiar type: the glam academic, the intellectual vamp”:Someone at pains for it to be known that, although smart and well educated, although a feminist and a woman in a position of power, the lady is no frump, no boring nerd, no sexless harridan. And so what if she’s past a certain age. The cling of the skirt, the height of the heels, the scarlet mouth and tinted hair . . . everything says: I’m still fuckable.“A certain age”—the phrase echoes mockingly through the early chapters of the novel, which find the narrator relaying conversations she has with other unnamed women about growing old. Irony occasionally swells into contempt, though the contempt hardly belongs to the narrator alone. Disdain for the elderly is a distinctly modern form of brutality, difficult to imagine before the nineteenth century, when great gains in life expectancy turned aging into a moral and aesthetic project. No doubt women are its primary targets. No doubt they suffer more for it. Obliged to learn the art of “aging gracefully” (the phrase appears as early as an 1894 newspaper article promising that old ladies “are a thing of the past”) in a culture where productivity and reproductivity are the measure of a woman’s worth, women invariably fail to do so, and either make a spectacle of their failure, like Nunez’s intellectual vamp, or shrivel into invisibility. That modern societies, and Anglo-American society in particular, treat the elderly as unseemly and disposable should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the news for the past six months.
For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves. The narrator’s gentle disdain for her Airbnb host (who looks “like a frightened toddler,” she thinks), her open hostility toward the glam academic—these reactions would have been easily comprehensible to her intellectual predecessors. Growing old, according to Simone de Beauvoir, transformed a woman into an “Other,” with the same anguish and irresolution that first becoming a woman did. “As men see it, a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object,” de Beauvoir wrote in her 1970 book, “The Coming of Age.” “When she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread.” Nunez’s friend Susan Sontag repeated de Beauvoir’s claim in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” adding that women often internalized other people’s revulsion as their own shame—a self-loathing made more unbearable for the high premium they had once placed on their youth and beauty. Nunez’s first novel, “A Feather on the Breath of God,” published in 1995, ends by foreshadowing this irony. That book’s narrator tries to explain her sexual recklessness to an older woman, “a stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.”
Twenty-five years later, the Nunez narrator is no longer young, and her face is more ravaged than ravished. Now she wants to look at the faces of the elderly women she meets, and, setting aside both sentimentality and her contempt, try simply to listen; to pay attention; to understand what they are going through.
by Merve Emre, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Anja Slibar
