Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "The Last of Her Kind"

Sigrid Nunez is the author of five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, and, most recently, The Last of Her Kind.

She graciously agreed to put The Last of Her Kind to the "page 69 test," and this is what she discovered:

Of course, there are two different page 69s to be considered, because page 69 of the hardcover of The Last of Her Kind is not the same as page 69 of the softcover.

Looking at the hardcover edition first, page 69 strikes me as representative of the novel in terms of style, perhaps, but not of content. For one thing, there is no mention of one of the novel’s two most important characters, the young woman to whom the book’s title refers. Also, a reader of this page, with its mention of “a dead kid” and “morgues” and “an unidentified teenage corpse” might think the book was a mystery novel….

Turning to page 69 of the softcover edition, however, I find a different story. Here we have both main characters: the narrator, Georgette George, and her college roommate, Ann Drayton. And in this excerpt, two of the novel’s most important elements are touched upon: the difference in the two women’s backgrounds (Georgette comes from a large, impoverished family; Ann is the only child of wealthy parents), and the troubled relationship between the radical Ann and the bourgeois mother and father she loathes.

That said, I prefer the less representative page 69, from the hardcover, simply because I think the writing is stronger. And that’s what would make this reader, at least, want to read more.

Many thanks to Sigrid for the input.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Last of Her Kind.

To listen to a podcast of Sigrid Nunez reading from The Last of Her Kind, click here.

Click here for a recent interview with Sigrid.

Among the many glowing reviews:

“The Last of Her Kind is full of incident and high drama … it is, above all, about the way women communicate and interpret their experience, bearing down on every nuance, irony, anguished interchange and heartbreaking loss…. [A]n unflinching examination of justice, race and political idealism that brings to mind Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and the tenacious intelligence of Nadine Gordimer.” --The New York Times

“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…. [The book] blossoms into a powerful and acute social novel, perhaps the finest yet written about that peculiar generation of young Americans who believed their destiny was to shape history…. This book is of course fiction, but it has more truth in it, more compassion, and more revelation, than all the confessional memoirs spewed up by all the self-aggrandizing idiots of the last decade. Don’t miss it.” --Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com