Sorrow Beyond Dreams

Novelists have all the answers, or at least they pretend they do. Within the compass of their pages, life unfurls and mysteries dissolve, and even when they don’t, well, that’s the point. It’s all sleight of hand, of course, a matter depending--most literally--on point of view.

How a story gets told determines what the story is: It’s a simple truth that balances on the ambition of the writer. Sigrid Nunez’s ambition in “For Rouenna” is modest but not insignificant. It begins with a suicide and ends with a portrait of struggle against forgetfulness and indifference. Two more unlikely paths could not have crossed than those of Rouenna and the narrator. She manages a clothing boutique in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn, and the narrator, who remains unnamed, lives in Manhattan and has finished her first book.

Rouenna wants her life to be written: more specifically, the year she spent in Vietnam as a nurse in the Army. She thinks the narrator might do her justice, only the narrator declines, and what follows--at first reluctantly, then in friendship and finally with the insistence of an unanswered question--is a story about the debt survivors owe to the dead.

When Rouenna kills herself, the narrator reconsiders her request. “In the period immediately following [her] death,” we are told, “the idea ... that there was something urgent between us, grew.... One of the first things I did was to buy a new notebook and write down everything I could remember about her.”

Old photographs and boxes of letters open the doors of the past, and Nunez skillfully weaves the story of their lives in Staten Island and of Rouenna’s experience in Vietnam. Writing a nearly transparent prose, reminiscent of Richard Yates, Nunez takes us breathlessly through the slow unraveling of Rouenna’s life and, like the events in Yates’ stories, the details are harrowing.

Twenty-two buildings, 600 apartments--the projects are an incestuous environment where doors are seldom closed. It was, according to the narrator, not a ghetto, not a slum, but a mistake. “Accidents happen, and it was not true what was said, that God protected small children and drunks.... Sometimes lightning strikes and strikes.” In Rouenna’s case, the strikes came from a mother who lies in bed all day, smoking and watching TV, anything to mask her deeper depression, and from a father with a sudden and nasty temper. Only scotch and soda, rum and Coke eased their sorrows.

It was a world not too dissimilar from Vietnam, where the project was an evacuation hospital in Danang, a place where getting your feet wet meant getting them wet with blood. She was 22 at the time, and they--the soldiers, the boys--were only 18, often about to die or, worse, return to combat. She gave her heart to them, “not to one man, no, but to all the men she had been with” and, in the midst of the dying and death, experienced a happiness she had never known before and would never know again. How was it possible, she wondered, one timeless moment off duty, the past and future blissfully undone, “to be so stoned and so clearheaded at the same time”?

After she left Vietnam, however, nothing made sense. Not the civilian hospitals she worked in. Not the men she met. Not the residual fear that filled her days. Forgetfulness only made what memories she had more painful. She changed jobs, looked after her mother and one evening took an overdose of heart medicine.

How do you take the measure of another person’s life? Do you use a scale to weigh the moments of happiness and sorrow? Do you track its history with a calendar and a clock? And when it is all said and done, what does that knowledge say about you?

As true as it is in life, so it is in fiction: We can only know ourselves with any certainty. It too is a simple truth, if only Nunez’s narrator knew it. Early on, she tells us that she was the one “brought back to life by this investigation” of her friend, but we finish “For Rouenna” without a sense of what her dying actually is or the reason for her empathy and obsession, leaving Rouenna’s struggle after the war to unhinge the narrative.

The dance between Rouenna and the narrator--the explicit and implicit stories of this first-person narrative--drifts instead of growing tighter, and Nunez’s ambition--indeed, to take the measure of another person’s life--is not thoroughly realized. As brilliantly drawn as Rouenna is, the rest of her world remains a shadow that darkens even while she slowly, even successfully, steps into the light.