Reading Sigrid Nunez’s absorbing new novel is somewhat akin to having a long conversation with someone who is telling you something very important, but is telling it in a very quiet voice. You have to really pay attention. Be assured, however, that the experience will be worth it. You will emerge calmer, meditative, more thoughtful, as if you have benefited from an excellent literary massage of sorts ... Nunez tells the simplest of stories — about a woman accompanying a terminally ill friend through her last months — and expands it into an exploration of the largest of themes: nothing less than the realities of living and dying in this world and how we feel about both ... Like the best of our writers, Nunez is a bit of a seer and a prophet, and so it is discomfiting to imagine that what she presents here as the state of the world could be true ... Nunez’s unerring and quietly observant eye burrows further and further into these experiences as if they will unearth an answer of sorts ... Beauty, friendship, nature, art: These are the salves to loneliness and despair, and Nunez offers them all in this searching look into life and death.

It takes something more than intelligence to be able to write intelligently ... Whatever it is, Sigrid Nunez has it. When I open one of her novels, I almost always know immediately: This is where I want to be ... It’s as good as The Friend, if not better ... This novel has sorrow in it. It’s also quite funny. We bumble our way toward death as we bumble toward everything ... [a] wise novel.

What Are You Going Through gets at its central action—itself deferred—slowly, circling it by way of these other encounters. One might want to compare the book’s conversation-heavy structure to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. But the Outline books are cold and austere, organized around a reticent observer whose judgments are nonetheless palpable. Love doesn’t come into them. Nunez’s narrator is more present—we sometimes get her own memories spliced in with someone else’s account—and conflicted, at times anguished ... Where suicide usually divides a person from others, in What Are You Going Through it brings the friend and narrator together, allowing them to repair and deepen their relationship ... Nunez’s...style, which has always been unflashy and matter of fact...has become even more compressed, with more of the architecture of plot and character stripped away. There is something ghostly and a little disembodied in the scene-setting and character description; what the reader remembers is what people say and think—their ideas—rather than how they move or what they look like ... It feels aged—wise, even, like her narrators have acquired knowledge at some personal cost. Nunez uses quotation to illuminate situation, and her choices can be devastating.

... a short novel, but it doesn’t leave you feeling shortchanged. In fact, quite the opposite — especially if you’re an older reader facing the questions of what life, mortality and human connection all add up to ... The book’s stark truths, silkily captured, touch on everything from '[t]he boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion' to the way young people view old age as 'a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature' ... Nunez is more interested in the tensions that animate the fabric of life than in narrative pyrotechnics. She’s fascinated by the foibles of memory, the difficulty of establishing the facts of people’s personal histories and the rich minefield that language can present ... Nunez is a kind of Scheherazade in reverse, gathering stories instead of dispensing them ... The key notes of the novel are its stoicism and its humor. Farce keeps intruding on desperation. Nunez’s narrator may be a no-frills realist, but that doesn’t automatically make her a pragmatist. And her friend’s behavior follows a similar pattern. Mishaps, panic and deepening affection ensue ... Nunez lends her narrator a cultural sensibility as eclectic as her own ... The bewildering thing about the novel — and the source of its greatest pleasure — is that it’s far more bracing than depressing. Its frank confrontation of bleak realities is exactly what energizes it ... The result is a book as luminous as it is deep and as slippery as it is firmly grounded ... as beautifully told as they come.

Sigrid Nunez is on a roll. She's tapped into a smart, wry voice which feels right for our times, as do her concerns with friendship, empathy, loss, and loneliness ... a worthy followup — a companion piece, if you will — that considers the comforts and emotional risks of a different sort of companionship ... It takes Nunez's meandering novel a while to get to this arrangement, whose dramatic potential is of course intense. That's in part because she is less interested in drama than in empathy ... less about the nitty-gritty of dying than about the difficulty of accurately capturing the swarm of feelings surrounding death ... The marvel of this novel is that it encompasses so much sadness yet is not grim ... Despite its serpentine path, What Are You Going Through explicitly aims for and pretty much manages to hit all of William Faulkner's prescribed goalposts for writers: 'love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.' Nunez has written another deeply humane reminder of the great solace of both companionship and literature.

... beautifully layered ... This conversational tone, coupled with quick pacing, make it easy to be drawn in ... It is quite a time to be reading a book about facing mortality, and there are other eerie echoes of our current situation ... With every story, readers remove a matryoshka head to reveal another, even more brightly painted one, underneath. Each layer embodies the notion that what is most personal is most universal. There is even a chapter that is partially narrated, or imagined to be, by a cat ... It can be disorienting that all of the stories are filtered through the voice of the narrator, with quotation marks rarely employed. This heightens the powerful way that cycles — of love, and death, and everything in between — propel the narrative. Readers are left to think about their own stories and how they might be retold by others. Like transparencies used on old overhead projectors, the narrator’s retellings bring her points into relief. Stacked all together, the parts that differ are clearly revealed ... At points, readers’ attention to any given sub-story may waver, guided by their own proclivities and lived experiences. This may also be influenced by the ways the stories bleed together, with narrator as raconteur. At the same time, what is left untold comes to define the story just as much as the moments where we are given a little too much of the mundane ... In the end, Nunez leaves some of the reader’s biggest questions unanswered. What matters, as with Weil’s question that opens the book, is the asking. In doing so, meaning is made. The narrator, and in turn the reader, are transformed.

What Are You Going Through portrays varied relationships—a life-defining friendship as well as a number of mundane interactions with loose acquaintances—that collectively provoke readers to examine how we listen to others and how we unburden ourselves in turn. The narrator assisting with her friend’s death presents an extreme test case for how one might help another bear their pain, but on a broader level, Sigrid Nunez is clearly concerned about the possibilities of empathy in our contemporary moment. It is not so much our capacity for empathy that worries her, but rather the cultural norms surrounding disclosure ... Nunez laments that bearing witness to another’s life is no longer understood as the responsibility of a friend, lover, colleague, or teacher, but rather is thought to require professional skill (and thus also compensation) ... What Are You Going Through makes me rethink my responses, problematizing the sanitized cultural forms allocated for intimacy and disclosure and repositioning witness bearing as a public duty. The novel focuses mainly on the narrator’s relationship with the friend who decides to pursue euthanasia with her assistance. It is through this character that the novel stages its most explicit critique of contemporary therapeutic forms, including journaling, psychotherapy, and support groups. Although these forms offer essential spaces for processing, they encourage us to share with others only when appropriate, modifying experience to fit into specific contexts and genres ... What Are You Going Through offers up the possibility that, though some forms of boundary setting offer crucial protections—particularly for women and people of color, who tend to perform a disproportionate share of care work in America—others are a way of reinscribing individualism, cloaked as self-care ... Nunez’s novel worries that overly consoling, navel-gazing self-care creates a form of therapeutic solipsism. Specifically, contemporary therapeutic forms cultivate solipsism by privatizing inner experience, training individuals to deal with their pain through a sort of inward retreat. While mainstream therapeutic settings can offer solace, they also tend to come with a prescribed set of social conventions, which can impel a person to discipline or suppress the very emotions they are attempting to process.

... this exquisite portrait of female friendship, aging and loss packs more insight into its barely 200 pages than many serious novels twice that length ... at various moments is touching, profound and even wryly humorous ... Nunez confronts the reality of death without succumbing to despair. Whether she’s summarizing the improbable plot of a serial killer potboiler or recounting a conversation between the narrator and a 'once beautiful woman' at the gym, she’s an economical, graceful storyteller. She also touches lightly but provocatively on subjects like climate change, the #MeToo movement and the malign influence of Fox News on one elderly woman’s psyche, then eases her story along almost before we realize it.

... initially resembles Rachel Cusk’s fiction — narrated by a fiercely intelligent teacher and writer, describing encounters with a series of individuals whose difficult stories accrue like mosaic pieces to form a painfully human tableau. Nunez’s prose, too, seems to echo Cusk’s cool, flat distance ... Nunez’s project has grander designs than mere literary satire or clever portraiture (though streaks of these spice the prose). It will meditate — at length, in earnest, often graphically — upon whatever life, death and love can presently mean ... may baffle readers for its impenetrable bleakness — apt as that may be for our present straits. But because it’s Nunez, long admired for her fearless, ruminative, sharply insightful work, we push on ... One’s moved by the scope and pith of this novel’s ambition, as it addresses our biggest questions by naming the particular. But most striking may be how Nunez’s narrator transfigures, through deepening compassion, from a wry, circumspect observer into someone raked raw with hapless love for her vanishing friend ... Still, it’s the here-and-now of What Are You Going Through that spears us, its chorale-like testimonies, their preemptive requiem.

For all Nunez’s knowing humor and dispassionate tone, her narrator embodies the injustices of aging that estrange women from social life, from one another, and from themselves ... What Nunez requires of the novel is a formal commitment to impersonality—or as close as one can get to impersonality while still writing in the first person. The narrator reveals little of her life, and rarely betrays her emotions. Her voice is calm, direct, aphoristic; at moments, humorously affectionate...Through her thoughtful gaze, the novel begins to extend its imperfect grace to all who are aging gracelessly in this modern world—which is to say, everyone ... Each conversation the narrator has is an exercise in attention: an occasion for her to shed her sense of self and to wait to receive the being she is looking at, just as she is, in all her truth. The slackness of the novel’s plot and the simple, unmarked quality of Nunez’s sentences are part of the narrator’s self-effacement ... The first time I read “What Are You Going Through,” I was neither impressed nor moved. Nunez seemed to be writing herself into a lineage of writers who took the power of attention to be the ethical imperative of literature. The novel nods at Virginia Woolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Elizabeth Hardwick, writers whose techniques of attentiveness work, in their different ways, to dissolve interiority into exteriority, mind into world. But Nunez doesn’t have Woolf’s ecstatic sensuality or Bachmann’s philosophical rigor or Hardwick’s swashbuckling flair. The novel’s spiritual imagination certainly interested me—it sent me in search of Weil’s essay. But aligning the novel’s aesthetics with its ethics seemed to demand too great a sacrifice on the altar of style. Frequently, my mind wandered ... Then I read the novel again. Perhaps my distraction had been a defensive pose ... Perhaps writing about a novel cultivates a practice of attentiveness that replaces the subjectivity of one’s initial judgment with a more undesiring form of argument—and, through it, appreciation. Rereading What Are You Going Through, I was dazed by the novel’s grace: its creation of a narrative consciousness that, by emptying and extending itself to others, insured that its vitality would never dwindle, never dim. Nunez had captured what Woolf, in her exquisite story on aging, The Lady in the Looking Glass, describes as life’s 'profounder state of being,' 'the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body' ... Nunez’s novel teaches an active concentration that intensifies as the reach of death grows; a concentration that becomes ever purer and deeper, up until the moment of death, when both attention and distraction cease. Language quiets itself, then departs, leaving us in silence

... conducts a meditative, closely observed exploration of the quotidian aspects of a life in the shadow of its annihilation ... Ms. Nunez possesses a flaneurial intellect; she strolls with ease between homespun personal anecdotes and musings on the writings of Kafka and Simone Weil. There is a mood of matter-of-factness to this book that feels both wise and unsettling. To live frankly in the time of 'too late' is to cross beyond despair and back into the world of the everyday. This book’s quiet discovery is that, no matter how extreme the circumstances, 'life must be dealt with.'

... doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Instead, it just asks us to listen to the moment ... Without presenting a 'right' or 'wrong,' Nunez carefully guides the novel through varying perspectives ... Cultivating care for others is the crowning achievement of the novel. What Are You Going Through balances the narrator’s restraint with other characters’ impassioned perspectives, offering a touching, poinant illustration of what it means to have empathy for the lives around you ... Instead of hunting for an impossible guidebook, What Are You Going Through prompts us to think about our own positions in the world, and the community we can offer to each other. Don’t mistake the narrator’s quiet action for passivity. Listening isn’t just doing nothing. Depending on the context, it can be an act of harm, or a blessing.

Nunez shares the heartbreaking faults of human communication. She demonstrates language’s shortcomings and the way it allows us to share experiences yet fails to connect us deeply enough to understand another living thing completely. At the same time, she illustrates the beautiful ways that we make do, and spend lifetimes in bittersweet pursuits of personal connections that might heal our emotional and existential wounds ... Nunez has reframed both the horror of addressing one’s own mortality and the process of despairing the loss of a loved one. There are two achievements that have allowed Nunez to accomplish this feat. One is by establishing a narrator superbly unique and round. The narrator’s observations, tangents, and her highly associative memory that leads to poetic distractions, create a high-water mark of realism ... The other aspect of the book that provides the foundation for the reader’s immersion is Nunez’s language. The novel is full of stunning prose ... The book seems to state that how we suffer, how we cope with despair and mortality, is how we communicate who we are in essence.

What Are You Going Through, masterfully depicts a death as it is happening. The book is a transitive space, a verb between two nouns, a going through ... through Nunez’s spare prose, each story feels overheard and fleeting, as though the narrator is listening to an intimate conversation through thin walls. Reading these stories, you slip into a state of reverence without realizing it; you find yourself breathing more quietly, partly out of respect, partly out of fear you might scare them away ... The book poignantly reveals a sorrow that belongs to everyone, and in this, offers a lasting comfort.

Nunez’s prose is dense with anecdotes and references, quoting everyone from John Waters to William Faulkner, less in homage than in curious, writerly conversation ... Where What Are You Going Through differs, though, is in how it situates intimate tales of individual lives in a simmering atmosphere of collective doom. The novel contains as clear-eyed an account of humanity’s grim prospects as you’re likely to find in fiction, but it is grounded in a series of stories about people — mostly women — facing the defeats and indignities of aging and dying. The subjects are all what you might expect — lost looks, lost health, isolation — but Nunez’s accounts are as sensitive as a polygraph’s needle, the precision of her observations turning banality itself into a source of pathos ... What Nunez so aptly depicts, in other words, is the jarring incongruity of thinking about impending horrors from within a present that feels largely the same as it ever was ... Nunez’s novels rival those of Dickens in their fascination with coincidence, but for her they are less plot drivers than ways to consider how we make meaning, as likely to be arbitrary as revelatory. The same is true of the associations What Are You Going Through creates among its dense, multifarious references, quotes and intertexts accruing significance through proximity ... Today it’s unfashionable to call someone a moral writer, a term that connotes stuffiness and artless didacticism, but Nunez both earns and redeems the title. Among the keenest observers of the messiness of pity, compassion, and love, her writing takes ideas about how we should treat other beings seriously while never losing sight of the social conditions that make such work so complicated and hard. What Are You Going Through offers a masterful representation of what it’s like to live in a shared state of slow death, a state in which, as Berlant suggests, 'life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable,' and when, perhaps, we need the truth of other people more than ever.

It’s unsurprising that Nunez’s latest book is concerned with death and friendship—and the vocabulary we use to describe it all. Her last novel, 2018 National Book Award winner The Friend , followed a woman in the wake of her best friend and mentor’s suicide ... Both books ask how we remember the most meaningful relationships in our lives—and do so without relying on plot ... In What Are You Going Through, Nunez leans on the writer’s introspective tendencies to the point where the novel veers into essayistic territory ... the question that connects the pieces of What Are You Going Through becomes clear: At what point is the pain too much? The two women don’t know the answer ... It’s a sentiment echoed throughout the book: sometimes the only words we have are insufficient to express what we really want to say.

Sigrid Nunez’s most recent novel, What Are You Going Through, is unflinching on the theme of mortality and thus presents an openhearted honesty so rare it feels thirst-quenching ... Nunez renders the pain of aging, especially as a woman, with quiet humor and philosophy brought to life by sharp characters. Readers of Nunez’s previous novel, The Friend, will recognize these qualities, but here they feel honed, turned up in intensity. Afterward, I flipped open a book by a young person, about young people, and how silly it all seemed.

The pleasure of this novel comes in its juxtapositions ... Readers are fortunate to be along for this journey of understanding. Ms. Nunez offers this quote from a famous unnamed playwright: 'There are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you’d discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people.' WhatWhat Are You Going Through is an effective brief for that contention.

... both personally and culturally, [the novel] concerns itself with the end of things. What Are You Going Through is at its best in this investigation of finality, asking questions about the will to survive, its value and its cost ... Yet despite the fact that What Are You Going Through is structured as a novel-in-chorus, incorporating many people’s stories into the narrative through their conversations with the narrator, the two central characters are the only ones drawn with complexity ... In this way, the novel feels unintentionally representative of the imaginative failure of contemporary liberalism: its inability to even envisage, let alone work towards, different social structures ... In the final pages, the narrator sits on a park bench, 'blessing' those that pass, asking for forgiveness herself. What Are You Going Through reaches, in its second part, towards mercy; it just fails to believe that everyone deserves it.

In this richly interiorized novel, following Nunez’s National Book Award–winning The Friend (2018), most dialogue is volleyed without quotes, putting readers themselves in continuous conversation with the narrator ... With both compassion and joy, Nunez contemplates how we survive life’s certain suffering, and don’t, with words and one another.

...short, sharp, and quietly brutal ... The novel is concerned with the biggest possible questions and confronts them so bluntly it is sometimes jarring: How should we live in the face of so much suffering? Dryly funny and deeply tender; draining and worth it.

Nunez’s deceptively casual and ultimately fierce work (after the National Book Award-winning The Friend) ambles through a range of digressions toward a plot involving euthanasia ... Much of the novel’s action is internal, as the attention of its judgmental, withholding narrator flicks from books to movies to sharp-edged thoughts about the people she encounters, offering plenty of surprises. Those willing to jump along with her should be tantalized by the provocative questions she raises.