New American classic

While you can't judge a book by its cover, sometimes you just get lucky. "The Last of Her Kind" is a major work of American literature. I had never heard of author Sigrid Nunez but I was attract?ed by the novel's cover: two young women in 1960s garb. I plucked it off the new arrivals shelf of the Neilson Hays Library and am so glad I did.

"The Last of Her Kind" is about Ann Drayton, a fierce idealist and champion of the poor, who rose to prominence during the student revolt at Barnard and Columbia in 1968. Her story is told by her roommate in freshman year, Georgette George.

Ann, a child of wealth and privilege, had specifically asked for a roommate from a poor background. Georgette fits the bill, growing up in a hard-scrabble upstate town in a family of "silence and violence" - a runaway father, an angry and chronically sick mother, and six children with dim prospects - Georgette turns her back on it all to make a life in Manhattan.

Ann took to political activism early to spite her wealthy parents. She's brilliant, sexually adventurous, a born leader. An only child, she adopts Georgette as her sister. Lazy and withdrawn, Georgette can't help feeling complimented. Night after night, they lie in the darkness and talk their hearts out.

"When you think about it, it wasn't such a far cry from psychoanalysis what took place in that room . . . I know that I felt cured of something once I opened up to Ann. I felt lighter, happier, after telling her things I'd not only sworn I would never tell her, but I'd thought I would never tell anyone." 

At this point, you wonder where the author isgoing with all this. What's going to happen to the pair over the next 38 years?

And suddenly you're off on a roller-coaster plot of giddying highs and lows, sharp twists and turns, dazzling surprises and harrowing plunges into the dark depths of character. Unlike less accomplished woman writers, Sigrid Nunez is not much interested in delicate shades of emotions. What's she's after is the wild panorama of the 1960s and how women coped for decades afterward. 

Georgette's tone is discursive, jumping back and forth between past and future, from confused teenager to twice-married middle-aged mother of two. She dropped out of Barnard after the sophomore year and became a secretary at a beauty magazine. She and Ann drift apart and the focus now shifts to a third woman, Georgette's younger sister Solange.

At fourteen and a half, Solange does the '60s in spades, running away from home and criss-crossing the country in a spate of drug-addled sexual adventures. She just missed Woodstock but had a front row seat at Altamont, leaving her with a traumatic fixation on Mick Jagger. After three years on the road, she turns up at Georgette's apartment with all kinds of physical and psychic wounds. She is living in an East Village tenement with a boyfriend named Roach, a stagehand at the Fillmore East rock concert hall.

"He had a way about him, as if all he wanted was to steer clear of hassles, keep his head down and his nose clean: the way of certain ex-cons," Georgette writes. "Roach looked like what he was, a survivor of an era that had tipped over into madness, a type that was just emerging around this time, guys whose histories could be read in their tattoos and prematurely lined faces, like a map of every wrong road they'd been down, and in their pupils, like spent match heads."

The description continues for a long brilliant paragraph and Roach is a decidedly minor character - he will leave Solange after her first psychotic episode and hospitalisation - but it's an example of the author's incisive sharp-edged tone. Just wait till she gets to the improbable "Big Love" of her life or Val Strom, her second husband, the brilliant critic and chronic philanderer. They not only spring from the page but grab your throat.

There is a harrowing set piece in which Georgette suffers a bad acid trip in Solange's wretched kitchen - one which leads the reader to instant empathy with Solange's multiple breakdowns. In another, Georgette goes to dinner with Ann and her lover, Kwame Kwesi, a former black radical now content to teach the sixth grade in Harlem. When Georgette innocently compliments him on his beautiful blue eyes, Ann flies into a raging tirade about rape during the days of slavery. The incident severs their friendship. 

In 1976, Ann is catapulted into American headlines when she shoots and kills a police officer named Thomas Sargente who had been harassing her lover. Her famous statement becomes a counterculture icon: "If Thomas Sargente had said nigger one less time, he might not be dead." In the gunfight, Sargente's partner is wounded in the leg and Kwame Kwesi killed. Refusing high-priced counsel or any contact with her parents, Ann is sentenced to 25 years to life. She devotes herself to service to her fellow inmates, mostly black and poor. 

Her lawyer compares her to Simone Weil, the severely ascetic French intellectual - "a woman of genius of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints," according to TS Eliot.

"Other descriptions: arrogant, difficult, violent, egotistical, obtuse, blind, melodramatic, noble, mystic, visionary, radical, ridiculous, passionate, humourless, selfless, selfless to the point of selfishness." 

With Ann lost behind her prison walls, Georgette uses two devices to illuminate her soul. She switches to third person to tell the improbable story of her "Big Love" who will shed light on Ann's childhood. And she appends a story published in the last issue of her late husband's literary magazine: "Orphan Annie and the Hand of God", a memoir written about Ann by a tough black prison mate who became her best friend.

The novel ends with Georgette in a taxi with her grown kids on their way to upper Manhattan to visit Solange who's just published a book of poems. As the three argue over the merits of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", Georgette recalls his line about walking up Fifth Avenue and picking out a romantic woman in the crowd and imagining entering into her life. The last line of her tale reads:

"I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, 'Pick me, pick me'."

What Fitzgerald did for the American Dream of the 1920s, Sigrid Nunez has for the 1960s. She has immortalised the time with all its passion, yearning, foolishness, pathos and nobility.