Customer Reviews

The Last of Her Kind: A Novel

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

I got the book because the topic appealed to me: contemporary American history, recounted via the biography of one-time college roommates. And it fascinated me to the very last word.

It turns out the plot is a lot richer than advertised on the bookcover - it gives us a glimpse of so many different aspects of both culture and counterculture in the 60s and 70s by narrating the stories of three women whose lives connect in sometimes strange but altogether credible ways (Georgette, the first person narrator, Ann, her upper class college roommate, and Solange, Georgettes sister). The main narrative is bracketed by contextualizing insights into both the "before" (the 50s) and the "after" (mainly the 90s), resulting in a pretty powerful, essentially non-judgmental description of how American society has changed over the past fifty years.

I find the memoir approach chosen by Nunez appealing, the way it jumps back and forth in the chronology of events, narrating and commenting on them as they are being re-collected by Georgette. This allows for a certain level of detachment and reflexive re-evaluation of events which Nunez is obviously instrumentalizing to show how both social and individual attitudes have evolved over the years. It is by way of this detachment, that the books' strongest point seems to be being made. This is a story about women facing the challenges of life, struggling with them and - each one of them - failing in some ways, succeeding in others, depending on character, disposition and autobiography. And it is specifically by contrasting these three very different women and how differently they were shaped by the same cultural and historical circumstances, that the plot is brought forth - in theory.

Unfortunately, the reflexivity and detachment of the memoir-style narrative heavily weigh down the writing style and are sometimes rather hard to bear - there are many moments when Georgette seems to be unnecessarily hammering in her point, like when she refers to her children's youthful self-righteousness in order to explain her changing perspective on Ann's (quite obviously self-righteous, but never selfish) behavior. It also actually flattens out the richness and complexity of the plot, because for all the reflexive banter none of the characters is ever fully developed in a convincing way.

I commend the book for its courageous, well-crafted plot and the insights it's given me into American culture and contemporary history. I wish the language were as powerful as the plot!

I think this must be one of the best novels of 2006--I simply can't believe I haven't read any of Nunez's earlier ones, I'm completely blown away by this subtle & wonderfully compelling novel. It has a sharp interest in morality and ideas that I miss in a lot of contemporary literary fiction; the characters are remarkably well drawn, and the prose exceptional. It brought to mind some of my favorite novelists--Joyce Carol Oates, Rebecca West--while being also very much distinctively like no other novel I've read. Highly recommended.

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.

I, too, considered the book a tad bit "tedious" at its outset. "Why am I reading this book when I could be reading others?" But something had me hooked. I am interested in the 60s, and I was very interested in the author's treatment of the effect of the sexual revolution on women; I myself felt part of that story (though I grew up in the 70s, not the 60s). I certainly did not mind the sometimes-"cipher"-like quality of the narrator: many Great Books have been written with such narrators. The crazy sister's letter to Mick Jagger made me laugh out loud. And the narration by the prisoner describing the end of Ann's life was the icing on the cake. I teach at a women's prison and could see so much of their reality in those wonderful pages. Ann--the radical roommate cum "lifer"--becomes a kind of tragic hero--and more; she becomes an icon of the paradoxes of 60s political philosophy. The author's interpolation of other voices and views on her, especially during Ann's trial, is convincing and provides balance. I can't imagine anyone critiquing the book as a political tract. Nonetheless, I cheered when Nunez subverted the traditional "American dream" line on Great Gatsby in the final pages. Her handling of form was deft and interesting.

I've read two of Nunez's other novels: MITZ, a biography of a marmoset, written in childlike gleaming prose, and FOR ROUENNA, mixing the genres of autobiography and fiction, and telling the story of two women, a novelist and an ex-Vietnam nurse, both raised in the Staten Island projects, as Nunez was. I praise the imagination that could create two such different narratives. And now we have THE LAST OF HER KIND, which continues to draw on the 60's with quiet sorrow. I think Nunez mourns the past and desires to preserve and understand its visceral energy. We need more women to write about wartime.

What does it mean to live completely and uncompromisingly by your principles? This novel, a compelling dual portrait of two college roommates who meet as freshman in 1968, captures the personal dilemmas, group obsessions and cultural divides of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Coming from a rough, impoverished childhood, Georgette George lives instinctively by the motto, "Don't let the pack know you're wounded" so she is flummoxed by her brilliant, privileged, idealistic roommate who wants to talk late into the night sharing every experience, idea and feeling. That roommate, Ann Drayton, is repulsed by the wealthy ruling class she was born into and romanticizes the underprivileged life Georgette is hoping college will help her escape. Post-college, as Georgette begins leading an increasingly conventional adult life, she continues to feel challenged by and concerned about the adamantly idealist Ann, who is preparing to teach inner city school children with her post-revolutionary African American boyfriend. Also part of the story is Solange, Georgette's runaway, psychologically fragile sister who is deeply embedded in the hippie era drug culture.