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Summary
Summary
The Last of Her Kindintroduces 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."
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Nunez's layered, thoughtful novel opens in the heyday of the civil rights movement, when Georgette George arrives at Barnard and is greeted by her activist roommate, Ann Drayton. Ann, a child of privilege who has rejected her upper-class roots, is persistent in her attempts to befriend Georgette, who comes from a working-class background. Georgette gradually finds herself drawn in by Ann. Although she never becomes the activist Ann is, the two remain friends even after they both drop out of college, until they have a violent fight and part ways for good--or so Georgette thinks. A few years later, Ann reappears as the central figure in a murder case that garners national attention. Ann stands accused of murdering the police officer who shot and killed her lover, an African American intellectual. Ann readily admits her guilt, and her seeming lack of repentance perplexes and enrages the country, but Georgette is unsurprised. Although she doesn't completely understand Ann, she has by now learned Ann's beliefs are unshakable and sincere. Nunez moves far past the obvious cliches about activism to show a character who, while not always completely sympathetic, is nonetheless multifaceted and three-dimensional. Told in Georgette's graceful, introspective voice, this engrossing, beautiful novel will enthrall readers. KristineHuntley.
Guardian Review
Two college room-mates are driven apart in this evocative reissued novel portraying America's 60s counterculture. The title of Sigrid Nunez's 2006 novel, reissued now, presumably, because its story of activists and bystanders chimes with the times, is an intriguing one. Who, precisely, is the last, and of what kind? For most of the narrative, one assumes it is Ann Drayton, whose journey from gauche rich kid to committed dissident is documented by her college room-mate; what is being explored here is the kind of hardcore commitment to a set of causes that we might imagine widespread cynicism to have eroded. But then it occurs that the narrator herself is also the last of a certain kind: a woman who follows without apparent regret her decision to sideline ambition and careerism to bring up her children. But rather than making her chief characters strained emblems, Nunez imbues them with considerable complexity and nuance. The narrator, George or Georgette - her name itself is unstable and problematic to her - does not conform to the stereotype of an escapee from a troubled, impoverished and violent background; arriving at college in New York in 1968, she does not bury herself in work, determined to succeed at all costs. Rather, she flunks out, rejects her briefly held attachment to student politics and immerses herself in the world of women's magazines. Meanwhile, it is Ann, the Connecticut teenager who installs a private phone in their shared room and lavishes material goods on George, whose determination to pursue equality and civil liberty to the point of dismantling society slowly kindles into zealotry. Nunez ably and effectively evokes the political and social atmosphere of the times: the obsession with Woodstock, with underground activist networks, with baiting and resisting the police. So thoroughly are her young protagonists in tune with the counterculture, for instance, that they refuse to be greatly moved even by the Tate-LaBianca murders. Through sketches of George's family - her abusive and powerless mother, the brother who is sent to Vietnam, and, in particular, the runaway sister who spends much of her life in and out of psychiatric wards - Nunez builds a composite picture of class in America; its counterpoint is Ann, who all but terrorises her devoted parents with her disdain for their wealth and privilege. Is her life of ideological purity made possible largely because of her unearned breaks, or a striking and impressive rupture with them? The Last of Her Kind is a novel of dramatic episodes; its hinge event, which defines both Ann's and George's lives, occurs far enough into the book for me not to reveal it here. Suffice it to say that developments drive them apart, and much of the book is concerned with how and whether they will be able to work their way back to each other. Along the way, Nunez takes a jeweller's eyepiece to racial and sexual politics, to the lasting impact of male violence and to the painful fragility of family bonds. Sometimes her digressions are simply too lengthy and didactic - an excursion into the life of Simone Weil, for example, felt like a darling she wasn't ready to kill, but should have - and the narrative's handbrake turns, while true to the random reversals of real life, are occasionally clunky and jarring. But above that stands an enormously absorbing novel with real heart to it, and a vivid recreation of a seismic and lastingly influential time.
Kirkus Review
A friendship between two women, forged during the tumult of 1968, is tested, torn and reaffirmed over the course of their very different lives. Georgette George, a shy freshman scholarship student at Barnard, doesn't know what to make of privileged, idealistic Ann Drayton. A firebrand for racial and social justice, Ann asked for a roommate "as different as possible" from her, in hope of bunking with a black woman, but accepts George, who is white, because at least she is from a poor home in upstate New York. The other freshmen find Ann a puzzle, too, and George befriends her initially because no one else--black or white--does. Over time, this headstrong self-made martyr, who gives away money by the fistful and lectures her bewildered parents on the sins of being white and rich, wins her heart, until Ann's righteousness causes an irreconcilable rift. Long after the two go their separate ways--Ann continues her activism in Harlem with her black schoolteacher lover; George works her way up the masthead at a fashion magazine--Ann is arrested for killing a police officer. Although they haven't spoken in years, George knows there is much more to the story than the newspapers report. Ann, who refuses all help, is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. George cannot begin to comprehend what has befallen her friend until she runs into Ann's patrician father, recently widowed. In perhaps the ultimate betrayal, but perhaps also the only way to connect with the inscrutable Ann, they have an affair, which, especially as portrayed by the philosophically adroit Nunez (For Rouenna, 2001), eventually helps George understand that friendships have many chapters, and that Ann, who works on prison reform from the inside despite the wrath of her fellow inmates who won't trust a white woman, just may not have closed the book on George yet. A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Every so often you close a book, and the only word that comes to mind is Wow. This fifth offering from award winner Nunez (For Rouenna) elicits such a reaction. Part social history and part platonic love story, it takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The action begins in 1968, when working-class Georgette George is forced to room with upper-class Ann Drayton. Georgette is wary of Ann but slowly allows a friendship to develop. As it does, both get a crash course in the ways race, class, and gender impact cultural dominance. The novel is never heavyhanded but tells an intricate story that relies on morally complex characters and their friends and family. While the women development is foremost, the era most important markers--the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, Black Panthers, Woodstock, hippie activities, feminist organizing, and AIDS activism, among them--offer a meaningful backdrop for each individual sojourn. Rich in historical detail, this unpredictable novel zeroes in on what it means to renounce class privilege and sacrifice oneself in the service of human betterment. Stunningly powerful, it is highly recommended.--Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez. Copyright (c) 2006 by Sigrid Nunez. Published January 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. W e had been living together for about a week when my roommate told me she had asked specifically to be paired with a girl from a world as different as possible from her own. She did not want a roommate from the same privileged world in which she had been raised, she said. She did not want a roommate who had been raised, as she had been (but this was my thought, not hers), to believe you could make this kind of special request and expect it would be granted. I, for example, would never have believed that I could have had any say in my choice of roommates. I did remember receiving some forms from the college housing office that summer, and answering such questions as "Do you mind rooming with a smoker?" But that I could have filled the blank half page under Comments with something like "I want a roommate from this or that background" would never have occurred to me. No, I wrote. I did not mind rooming with a smoker, even though I was not a smoker myself. I had no preferences of any kind. I was completely flexible. Though I had done well in high school, I had never taken it for granted that I would go to college: no one in my family had done so before me. That I had managed to get into not just any college but a good one remained a little overwhelming. I left the space under Comments blank. I had no comment to write unless it was to say thank you, thank you for accepting me, and when my roommate told me what she had done, it brought me up sharp. How exactly had she phrased it? What words had she used to describe me? * * * It was 1968. "Your roommate will be Dooley Drayton," someone from the school had written me later that summer. "Miss Drayton is from Connecticut." But one of the many changes she made soon after arriving on campus was her name. She would no longer go by the name Dooley she said. It stank of bourgeois affectation. And worse. Dooley was a family name, and the part of her family that had borne the name, somewhere on her mother's side, had been from the South, she said, and were descended from plantation owners. In other words, slaveholders. So "Dooley" was out of the question. We were never to call her by that shameful name but rather by her middle name, the taintless "Ann." Her father was the head of a firm that produced surgical instruments and equipment, a business that had been in Drayton hands for some generations (before that they were barbers, Ann told me, and this was true and not the joke I at first took it to be), and the family owned several valuable patents. Her mother did not work, she had never worked, though she'd had a good education. She, too, was from a prominent family, older and more distinguished if less prosperous than the Draytons, and she was an alumna of our school. "She's one of those women," Ann said. "You know: she belongs to all these clubs and sits on all these boards, she goes to a lot of benefits and parties, and when she throws a party herself, it gets written up in the paper." I did not know any woman like that. Excerpted from The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
