What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
Published 2020 · 208 pages · 43,343 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is What Are You Going Through to read?
What Are You Going Through scores 76 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Nunez writes in a plain, essayistic style. The vocabulary is educated but never showy, reflecting a narrator who values clarity over display.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Short, declarative sentences predominate. Nunez achieves complexity through accumulation and juxtaposition rather than syntactic elaboration.
- Abstraction: 70 out of 100
- The novel is deeply concerned with abstract questions — empathy, mortality, the ethics of storytelling — but approaches them through concrete anecdotes and observations.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- The essayistic mode packs in anecdotes, quotations, and reflections efficiently. Each digression carries thematic weight.
- Narrative indirection: 75 out of 100
- The central story — accompanying someone to death — is approached through a series of seemingly tangential anecdotes that gradually reveal their relevance.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Nunez works through directness rather than symbolism. The anecdotes function as parables but not as coded symbols.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The narrator maintains a cool, observational tone that occasionally sharpens into dry humor, especially when describing literary culture and self-absorbed men.
- Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100
- The death occurs but is not dramatized. The aftermath is rendered obliquely. The novel ends with a meditation rather than a scene.
- Structural complexity: 82 out of 100
- An essayistic novel that moves between anecdotes and the central narrative. The structure is associative rather than chronological, but not difficult to follow.
How What Are You Going Through is regarded
What Are You Going Through holds a literary regard score of 39 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.