Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God

private big bangs & faultless inner sensors

“Now let me say something about the pain of not dancing.”

Every so often I come across a book, usually one published a few decades ago, that is so good, so lively and funny and moving, that I find myself walking through the library (where my beloved, neglected book had to be summoned up from the morgue-like depths of basement storage) quietly fuming. What are all these people doing, sitting in front of their YouTube tutorials and forgettable detective novels and day-old tabloids? This entire library has one single, battered copy of this masterpiece! Why isn’t there a line around the block?

The latest book to provoke this particular tantrum is Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God, a debut novel from 1995. It sounds, from its title, like it might be the translated memoir of a European soccer star, but it is in fact the Brooklyn-based cousin of Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Its pages are packed full of housing project stairwells and reeking restaurant kitchens and noisy sewing machines. It manages to make the ordinary business of becoming an adult — parents and neighbors and guilty, half-fathomed longings — feel like the private big bang that for each of us it actually constitutes.

The tone is casual, spontaneous, telegraphic. Here she is on her mother’s girlhood in Germany:

The rallies and victory parades. “Tell me what kid doesn’t love a parade.” A little flag on a stick. Flowers for the soldiers. Always something to celebrate. April 20^th: the Führer’s birthday. My mother has just celebrated her tenth. He marches through the Munich streets, veering right and left with outstretched hand. His palm is warm. Photo opportunity. Later, back at school, a copy of the photo is presented to her. She bears it home, proud, somebody. Her mother tears it up. My mother threatens to tell.

And on her first visit to her rich friend’s Upper East Side apartment:

As always, I was struck by the amount of food. Pyramids of cans, a whole shelf of cereal boxes; many kinds of coffee, many kinds of tea. “What would you like to drink?” The first time Portia asked me this I said, “What do you have?” She gave me a puzzled look, then laughed and said, “Anything you want, silly.” And it was so.

This is writing that makes you want to chuck the top hat and tuxedo of literary frippery and spend the rest of your life in a T-shirt and jeans.

But what fascinates me about the book — one of the things that fascinates me — is how Nunez moves us through it. She has no interest in the creaking mechanisms of plot. She’s too free and fleet-footed for the safety rail of chronology. So what will be her organizing principle? What will give us the feeling that we’re reading something more than the shuffled pages of a clever writer’s journal?

The answer turns out to be: urgency. She will tell us what she needs to tell us, in the order that feeling dictates. She no more needs a plan for the book than you need a plan for when in a given day to pee. You come pre-loaded with a faultless inner sensor — the trick is just to pay attention to it.

So the book proceeds like an ideal therapy session — A leads to B leads to C not because A caused B and C but because A and B and C are joined by a root system that we cannot see but only sense. Which sounds fairly high-flown and abstract, but watch how simply and elegantly Nunez puts this spontaneous organization into action.

She’s been writing in this chapter about her adolescent obsession with ballet dancing. She’s talked about the anorexia (“… days when you had managed to eat nothing but one apple and maybe a candy bar, you went to bed nauseated and with a splitting headache, but also with a sense of triumph…”), the shoes (“…hot, cramped, throbbing toes…”), the disappointments (“Once I stopped dancing every day, I immediately lost what proficiency I had, which would not have happened to a better dancer.”)

And then she writes this:

I have spoken of the pain of dancing. Now let me say something about the pain of not dancing.

That second sentence is the genius of the book distilled into eleven words. She sets us up for it with the word spoken in the sentence before — the book is not explicitly a spoken book, a la Portnoy’s Complaint, but with that word she crystallizes the sense that we have indeed been in a kind of intimate conversation, perhaps sharing a cigarette in the corner of a party.

And then with Now let me say something she makes that dynamic explicit. Let her? Could we stop her? The phrase has the shape of a request — but, as anyone who’s ever been in such a conversation knows, it acts like a demand (Now let me tell you something about that goddamn sister of yours).

We feel, in this sentence, that we are almost, almost being berated — but with the crucial difference that Nunez is so clearly animated here not by grievance but by anguish. Having told us about the pain of dancing she can’t not tell us about the pain of not dancing. She is responding, moment by moment, to the imperatives of emotion and intuition and desire. In the presence of such aliveness, plot triangles and narrative timelines and other such dusty tools reveal themselves for what they are — things to go by when you’re lost. Nunez is (unlike her wonderful, too-rarely-checked-out book) gloriously found.