Resources / Book of the Month

We have never reviewed a work of fiction on this site before, but The Last of Her Kind carries a message that deeply resonates with us, one that illustrates what it means to “make waves.” Perhaps a better way to put it is to say that making waves often incurs penalties.  Conventional folk can become really annoyed with those who don’t know, or don’t accept, their place in life.  The results can range from merely acrimonious to horrifying.

Most people like to put others into little boxes labeled with names like “black,” “gay,” “socialist,” “rich kid,” “blue collar,” and so forth.  In The Last of Her Kind, author Sigrid Nunez serves up memorable, if not especially likable, characters who resist categorization and are made to suffer for it. 

The story is told from the point of view of Georgette George, who is (bluntly) a white trash girl from rural, upstate New York.  It begins in 1968 at Barnard College in New York City, where “George” arrives on scholarship to find herself rooming with a very wealthy girl named Dooley Drayton.  After expressing her initial disappointment that George isn’t black, Dooley comes to confide in her friend, and vice versa, throughout their freshman year at Barnard.  Over the course of time both girls drop out of school and drift apart, but they know each other’s stories and, for George at least, the enigma of her friend stays with her like an aura. 

Dooley toys for a time with radicalism and eventually settles down with her activist, black boyfriend.  George drifts through a series of ill-fated relationships, eventually reconnecting with Dooley in a most odd way, which to describe in any detail will ruin the novel for any of you who might wish to read it (and you most certainly should read it.) Dooley’s empathy for, and admiration of, what one might call the “poor, black experience” earns her the contempt of her own class, as well as of the blacks she tries to befriend.  By the novel’s climax, it has become apparent that resentment and envy cut both ways, and that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

-- Bonnie