Fifty Books Project 2023

The Friend
by Sigrid Nunez

What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.  To say nothing ow what we wanted in life but never got to have.  

The cover illustration, the reviews, and the word of mouth I had heard before reading all led me to believe this was a novel about a woman's relationship with a dog.  It is not.

There is a dog in the novel - there are two actually and at least one of them is real.  But in my humble opinion, the dog is incidental to the true thrust of the novel.  It is the story of an unnamed narrator whose closest friend has recently committed suicide and of the grieving process the narrator goes through.  She has, as a consequence of the suicide, adopted a Great Dane that previously belonged to the man who committed suicide and through the dog works out some of her feelings for this lost man.

The dog, it turns out, is the polar opposite of his former owner - quiet, modest, calm and devoted.  Her friend was a womanizing loudmouth, bitter about the course of his career and increasingly misanthropic.  The narrator does not seem to draw this parallel and her relationship with the dog does not cause her to reevaluate this man in her life.  Apollo - the dog is the only character with a name - simply draws attention to the qualities of the man by nature of the contrast.  The dog's utter acceptance of life and apparent satisfaction draw attention to the woman's emotional angst and sense of loss.

We learn that the sense of loss begins before the suicide.  The man was once her writing professor and they had a brief sexual affair many years earlier, though the man then went on to marry a different student.  She has, in a sense, the better relationship with him. Their friendship is a constant through all three of his marriages and she seems to have a legitimate claim to being the most important woman in his life.  That he is gone has devastated her, but we learn over and over that there was loss in all aspects of their relationship even when he was alive.

Because the man is a writer and the narrator was his student and is struggling with whether to continue writing, the novel is also a mediation on this art form.  There are funny and wild observations about the literary world around New York and cutting observations about teaching college level creative writing courses at this point in time.  Many of these observations are at odds with the existence of the novel, which is self-consciously experimental and beautiful often enough that the notion that literature has become a dead end (a view the man espoused before and perhaps leading up to his suicide) is continually undercut by its own presentation.

Even at 200 pages, the book seems to ramble, with tangents and shifts in direction that are off-putting for the first hundred or so pages.  However, at a certain point the prose and the reading experience begin to work - as does the woman's relationship to the dog and this becomes something of a page turner, alternately touching and laugh out loud funny.