What Are You Going Through is both brilliant and mercifully brief. Weighing in at 200-odd pages, it can be read in five hours flat and will leave you staring into endless night. ‘Make the audience suffer as much as possible,’ advised Alfred Hitchcock, and Sigrid Nunez, whose subject is emotional extremity, follows suit.
The suffering begins at the start when the narrator, a woman of a certain age whose name we never learn, goes to a talk by a writer, whose name we also never learn. His lecture, given in a polished, emotionless voice, is about the death of the planet:
It was over, he said. It was too late, we had dithered too long. Our society had become too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in time, the calamitous mistakes we had made.
The writer — who turns out to be the narrator’s ex — offers no way out of this apocalyptic scenario: we are on the Titanic and ‘should be utterly consumed with dread’; our children and grandchildren will suffer so much that ‘the living will envy the dead’. Members of the audience wonder if he might have been sulking because the hall was only half full.
The narrator, who is visiting a friend with terminal cancer, is staying in an Airbnb. The accommodation was meant to include a cat, which had died since she made the booking. The dying friend, meanwhile, asks if the narrator will help her, when the time comes, to terminate her life. ‘I promise,’ the friend says, ‘to make it as much fun as possible.’ The book’s message is clear: the end of the world might be out of our control, but the end of our lives is not. ‘The love of our neighbours’, says Simone Weil in the book’s epigraph, ‘simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”’ Nunez repeatedly asks the question, and listens attentively to the answers.
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