The Last of Her Kind: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. When Georgette George and Ann Drayton meet in 1968 as freshmen roommates at Barnard College, Georgette marvels that her privileged, brilliant roommate envies Georgette's rough, impoverished childhood. Through the vehicle of this fascinating friendship, Nunez's sophisticated new novel (after For Rouenna) explores the dark side of the countercultural idealism that swept the country in the 1960s. Hyperbolic even for the times, Ann's passionate commitment to her beliefs—unwavering despite the resentment from those she tries to help—haunts Georgette, the novel's narrator, long after the women's lives diverge. In 1976, Ann lands in prison for shooting and killing a policeman in a misguided attempt to rescue her activist black boyfriend from a confrontation. The novel's generous structure also gracefully encompasses the story of Georgette's more conventional adult life in New York (she becomes a magazine editor, marries, and bears two children), plus that of Georgette's runaway junkie sister. Nunez reveals Ann's life in prison via a moving essay by one of her fellow inmates. By the end of this novel—propelled by rich, almost scholarly prose—all the parts come together to capture the violent idealism of the times while illuminating a moving truth about human nature. (Jan.)
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From The New Yorker

Nunez's ruthlessly observed portrait of countercultural America in the sixties and seventies opens in 1968, when two girls meet as roommates at Barnard College. Ann is rich and white and wants to be neither, confiding, "I wish I had been born poor"; Georgette has no illusions about poverty, having just escaped her depressed home town, where "whole families drank themselves to disgrace." Georgette finds Ann at once despicable and mesmerizing, and she's stunned—if not entirely surprised—when, years after the end of their friendship, Ann is arrested for killing a cop. In previous works, Nunez has proved herself a master of psychological acuity. Here her ambitions are grander, and the result is a remarkable and disconcerting vision of a troubled time in American history, and of its repercussions for national and individual identity.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (December 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374183813
• ISBN-13: 978-0374183813
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #686,932 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great character emerges, November 20, 2006

By	Driver9 (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

The negative reviews are hard for me to figure out. It seems as though I read a different book from some of the reviewers. Ar maybe Amazon got their circuits screwed up. But I felt like I was reading an extraordinary novel about about two women caught up in their time. Anne Drayton emerges as the left wing purist, almost the anti-Holly-Golightly. Her friend/nemesis/mirror and narrator Georgette George diverges from her and yet they are both marked permanently by their time, the 1960s. The portrait of Georgette and her hardscrabble past is completely genuine and excellently developed.

The time of this novel was captured beautifully by Nunez, and it brought back memories I had nearly forgotten. Memories of New York City in the early 1960s, the great rift in the country at that time, the emergence of left wing children of the wealthy. I did not find that the writing was disjointed or that the fragments lacked unity. Especially since the novel spans several decades. It is not a perfect novel, if there is such a thing, but is certainly worthy of more stars than many of the reviewers have stingily doled out. This is a work of great quality and artistry, unlike so many novels that are sensationalized these days and which receive unwarranted accolades as a "good read" (a term that should be banned; whenever I hear someone say it was a good read, instead of a good book or novel, I hear them diminish the writing by commoditizing it, focused only on whether the book pleases them, like some performing dog; it becomes all about the reader and the obsessive need to be reassured; Faulkner or Garcia Marquez or Proust would Not be "good reads")

Anyway, I think this book is one of the best books of 06.

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Knockout, December 29, 2005

By	Real Reader (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews

Stylistically written very much in the vein of Philip Roth's great American novels of the 1990s, but importantly diverging from them in content because this is America from a woman's point of view, Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind connects the large events of our lives with the small and renders the decade of the 1960s with unprecedented wisdom and truth. If you are looking for a TV-type docudrama, this isn't the book for you. If, however, you wish to understand a time that has been sensationalized and often misrepresented-and is here depicted in a way that is closer to how one's own individual consciousness processes and remembers experience--you are in for a powerful ride. Nunez, one of our most innovative and humane writers, has tackled the world in this book: Watch out Franzen, Lethem, et al., there's a girl on the block.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Echoes of Woodstock, February 27, 2007

By	Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Last of Her Kind: A Novel (Paperback)

My four-star rating is a compromise. I was thrilled by the first part of this book, about two Barnard College roommates from different backgrounds in the heyday of the radical movements of the late 1960s. I found myself wanting to urge it on my wife, who missed those times by only a few years, and my daughter, a college sophomore herself. But after a certain point, the book lost focus, and my five-star expectations dwindled to three stars or even two, never quite to recover.

The "last of her kind" is Ann Drayton, an heiress who rejects everything that her family stands for (including her given name of Dooley) and seeks to identify instead with the less fortunate. Her projects include working-class Georgette George, the novel's narrator, who soon becomes a true friend. This part of the book is an almost pitch-perfect time capsule of memories from the Woodstock years: free love, the drug culture, radical student empowerment, and the shadow of Vietnam. Although holding firmly to her own convictions and by no means a follower, Ann shines as an icon of the era. But the two women drift apart and eventually quarrel. Georgette insists that Ann still remains in the center of her mind, but the novelist has difficulty keeping her there. For a while, the focus shifts to Georgette's disturbed sister, Solange, whose hippie background represents a different face of the times, and defines the absent Ann by contrast. At times the writing becomes more like a memoir than a novel, as Georgette jumps around in her own story: her jobs, her marriages, her children. Ann is hardly mentioned in these chapters, but returns to the narrative abruptly when she is convicted of a sensational crime and sent to prison (this much is revealed on the book jacket, so no spoiler). Once Ann is physically removed from Georgette's world, however, the author has to adopt awkward strategies to return her to the frame, positing a rather unlikely contact between Georgette and Ann's family, switching voice from first to third person, and even bringing in a second narrator towards the end.

Yet even though her narrative thrust falters and the last part of her novel seems more like an extended explanatory epilogue, Nunez keeps one reading because of her feeling for the legacy of a troubled era and her clear moral compass. On the evidence of this book, she may not be the greatest novelist, but I have nevertheless been glad to spend four days in her company.