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The Last of Her Kind: A Novel by [Sigrid Nunez]

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Sigrid Nunez

The Last of Her Kind: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Sigrid Nunez (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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The paths of two women from different walks of life intersect amid counterculture of the 1960s in this haunting and provocative novel from the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend

Named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and theChristian Science Monitor

Sigrid Nunez's 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.

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."

Print length

398 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

December 12, 2006
File size

623 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Megan Marshall, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] carefully written and discerning narrative with closely drawn portraits of two prototypical yet unique women trying to construct a friendship across an unbridgeable class divide. . .Nunez's keen powers of observation make her a natural chronicler."

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"A writer of Nunez's piercing intelligence and post-feminist consciousness may well feel that writing the Great American Novel is no longer a feasible or worthwhile goal -- but damned if she hasn't gone and done it anyway."

About the Author

Sigrid Nunez is also the author of the novels Naked Sleeper and For Rouenna. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She currently lives in New York City. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez. Copyright © 2006 by Sigrid Nunez. Published January 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

We 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.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Nunez explores idealism against the backdrop of gender, racial, and cultural politics. Many critics thought this "strongly imagined portrait of the 1960s" the novel’s "most striking" aspect (Wall Street Journal). A few, however, criticized Nunez for overemphasizing the turbulence of the period, casting judgment on it, and describing its madness—drug-induced hallucinations, for example—in unnecessary detail. The value of certain subplots, including one involving Georgette’s runaway hippie sister, also raised a few eyebrows. Yet all agreed that the novel offers gripping characterizations and an intelligent, provocative look at the lasting influencing of friendship.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

*Starred 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. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004M8T0UW
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (December 12, 2006)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 12, 2006
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 623 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 398 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #455,629 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,189 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #3,948 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #4,732 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
196 ratings

About the author

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Sigrid Nunez

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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 six more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006), SALVATION CITY (2010), THE FRIEND (2018), and WHAT ARE YOU GOING THROUGH (September, 2020). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Learn more at www.sigridnunez.com.

Customer reviews

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3 star		7%
2 star		3%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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JAS

Good Book

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2019

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The book tells the story of a turbulent time period in America. The book is good and deserves to be read. I lived my youth during this time period. However, it really only tells half the story. We really had few to turn to in this period. Many of us wanted something more honest and rejected both political parties. Unlike today, when we pick sides and its all in for our team.

In Defense od Simone Weil:
The author compares the character Ann to the late author and philosopher Simone Weil. I don’t disagree with this assertion. In Simone Weil’s “On the Abolition of All Political Parties”, Weil argues against to concept of political parties. She once said: “parties were organizations designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and justice”. Weil claimed we should not label ourselves as part of our thoughts “if one were to entrust the organization of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device”. Ann has the fire and the spirit of Weil, but she is a role player of a team where all non-members are bad.

8 people found this helpful

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Jeff LeVine

Completely captivating from beginning to end.

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2020

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This book touches on so much – a lot of heavy subjects (class, race, child abuse, rape, mental illness, divorce, murder, prison and more), but surprisingly, it usually do so in a sort of chatty tone, like a good friend trying to amuse you more than bum you out. Overall, the book reads more like a page-turner, and really doesn’t feel especially heavy. It opens in 1968 with the story of two college roommates at an all-woman’s school in New York, and basically follows their lives through all the changes to come, over the next thirty or so years. One comes from money, but is trying to escape her background and is fairly involved with leftist causes, the other (really the main character) comes from a more modest background, and seems more interested in just fitting in. There’s lots of memorable characters throughout the book (I was maybe most interested in the narrative around the main character’s younger sister, who runs away from home as a young teenager), and lots of memorable events. It’s actually kind of amazing how much Sigrid Nunez was able to cram into this book… it’s 390 pages long, but seems to have 800 pages worth of completely captivating story.

4 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A treasure

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2021

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Sigrid Nunez is a treasure. Each time I start one of her books, I decide early on where she is going with it, and I am both surprised to find that she had a much different destination in mind and pleased when I find out where we are going. This one started as a fairly common memoir about a couple of college roommates but turned out to be much more.

3 people found this helpful

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Denise

A compelling story

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2019

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A tale of young women coming of age in the tumult of the late 1960s. Nunez captures the tone of the times beautifully, as well as serving up two very different protagonists: The narrator, a working class girl from the North Country of NYS, and a privileged only child of a wealthy Connecticut family. Nunez is a talented writer. I enjoyed the book enormously. My only reservation was the last part, written from the POV of a prisoner, which was not as convincing or successful as the rest of the novel.

I found the martyrdom of the wealthy girl totally believable. I, too, had a college roommate who came from wealth but devoted her life to the part of society most people run from. As for the narrator's story, that, too, was beautifully drawn.

4 people found this helpful

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classicist

powerful

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2019

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I found this story of a difficult personality surprising, thoughtful, compelling, and truthful.

4 people found this helpful

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TundraBee

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2007

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Sigrid Nunez tale is not of Two Cities, but of two classes in the turbulent times of the 1960s in the USA. It is a tale at times dead-on, an insightful rendition of the chaos and the chasms between haves and have nots, races, and cultures, rendered sometimes with pain and angst, sometimes with humour, and sometimes like a respite backwater pool away from the raging river.

The scene in the affluent restaurant, while Judy Collins sings "Both Sides Now" in the background, is sublime!

/TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer "Been there, done that, got the proverbial T-shirt (which no longer fits this 40-years-older Boomer ;-) "

10 people found this helpful

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Maxine

it's a brilliant tour de force

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2019

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I loved the writing, the story is fascinating and important.

4 people found this helpful

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Susola

One of the best books I've ever read!

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2010

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Sigrid Nunez vividly captures the era she writes about. I couldn't put this book down! I meet the author at a book reading for charity and got to ask lots of questions about the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to recapture the wild explosive era of the 1960's. An excellent read.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

AntiFaith

Fantastic

Reviewed in Canada on January 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

Not a false note from beginning to end. Fascinating characters, well-drawn interesting time in history, great writing style. Thankfully no long, ornate passages describing landscapes or decor. I was compelled to read, without breaks, for hours on end.

Philip Cassell

Brilliant and involving novel.

Reviewed in Australia on August 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

Nunez is a great writer? Is there a better living novelist? The Last of Her Kind is a pleasure to read; yet it is challenging at the same time. It helps if you are of that generation that is the focus of book.

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