Shortly into What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, it becomes clear that the narrator is unreliable or, at the very least, absentminded; she has misled the reader by failing to mention a significant connection she has to another character. What additional details might she be withholding? This question becomes less consequential as the book winds on. The unnamed main character may conceal facts and approach the stories of others with marked bias, but what she shares soon begins to feel more important than what she doesn't, and the limits of her subjectivity begin to seem like the point.

If the novel is about any one thing, it is the narrator's experience of becoming involved in the end-of-life plans of a friend who has terminal cancer, but there are many detours along this main path. Like Nunez's National Book Award-winning novel The Friend, What Are You Going Through opts out ...