The Last of Her Kind: A Novel [Hardcover]

Sigrid Nunez (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374183813 | ISBN-13: 978-0374183813 | Publication Date: December 27, 2005 | Edition: 1st

The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work. As the novel's narrator, Georgette illuminates the terrifying life of this difficult, doomed woman, and in the process discovers how much their early encounter has determined her own path, and why, decades later, as she tells us, "I have never stopped thinking about her."

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: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,286,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sigrid Nunez was born in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, whose lives she drew on for part of her first novel, A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD (1995). She went on to write five more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006) and, most recently, SALVATION CITY (2010). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 33 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

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

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars High expectations, poor execution, February 12, 2007

By 

Kate (Illinois) - See all my reviews

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

I think that Ms. Nunez bit off more than she could chew with this novel.

I really like the premis of the story - college roommates become best friends, and the more ambitious one in many way shapes the other. I was looking forward to the inevitable split between the two and how they'd find their way back to each other. But sadly, despite the length, I don't feel that these two characters ever really materialized. You find out precious little about the narrator. She has two bad marriages, and you don't really find out why she felt she would never find true love again after her affair with Ann's father. Her relationship with her children was never fleshed out, and you had no idea what she wanted out of life (other than envying a marriage and having a child of an early boss). As far as Ann, you learned everything about her really quickly, and then were told it, over and over and over again. Her political views and beliefs were in the forefront again and again. I can understand why some reviewers think that Ms. Nunez was just spilling out her political agenda from the Vietnam era. I'm not sure I can agree, but I sure didn't feel bad about being a materialistic person after reading this. Ann was not made very sympathetic. Until the affair with the father happens towards the end, you don't learn anything new, and then, you only learn a few antecdotes about her childhood that helped shape her. The book concludes with a long narrative from a friend of her's from prison. Even in this, you don't learn much about her. She's a tragic figure, not just because she's misguided in her efforts, but because Ann never developed after she turned 17.

The writing I found very disjointed. I did not particularly care for the long rambling section in the middle about the narrator's sister, with a SEVERAL page rambling love letter to Mick Jagger stuck in the middle. On its own, the story between the sisters from a bad home could have been beautiful. But sandwiched in between the relationship with Ann, it just took away from the opportunity to learn more about the protagonist. And the reconciliation between the two friends was contrived and wasn't worth having to learn so much about a sister that in the end was treated as an after thought.

Finally, I must comment on the letter from the "prisoner" at the end. Ms. Nunez is simply not a skillful enough author to pull off two different first person narrations in the same book. If one was to thumb through the book and read a random passage from the prisoner, it is only the setting of the letter that differentiates it from Georgette George. The voice of these two women were identical, rambling tones, word usage, etc. If this was the author's intent, it was totally lost on me. It just struck me as amateurish.

All in all, if you are looking for a book about friendship or even about college life in the late 1960s, I'd keep looking.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent, July 14, 2007

By 

Hunter R. Austin (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Last of Her Kind: A Novel (Paperback)

The best novel I've read in 2007. Style, story, depth, character development, texture, humor and voice, all just great. I recommend this book for anyone who has lived those times or wants to get a personal feel what the 60's/70's were all about. Ms. Nunez has the gift of making the reader feel like it's just you and her in the room, and nothing else matters. I finished it in two days and immediately loaned it out to my circle.