The Friend

An unnamed writer and English professor writes her feelings to an older, lifelong friend and prominent author, also unnamed.  She grieves because the friend is dead.  A suicide.  Although years ago, they had spent a single night together, by tacit agreement their ensuing friendship had been platonic, a meeting of minds.

But the narrator is nevertheless devastated.

Her mentor had left her something to remember him by.  A 180-pound Harlequin Great Dane, a dog the distinguished author had found in a park, unattended but well-trained.  He had named him "Apollo," and adopted him.  The narrator reluctantly accepts responsibility for the dog, despite the tiny size of her 500-square-foot Manhattan apartment.

The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez (2018), is largely autobiographical, although, Nunez says, that wasn't her original intention.¹  It's a novel, but it doesn't read as a conventional novel, a story with plot and characterization.  It reads more like a memoir, a collection of thoughts, a stream of consciousness.  Many of her thoughts are a brief paragraph in length, before she moves on to another subject.  The novel contains the narrator's expressions of grief at her friend's death, and descriptions of how she handles her grief; lengthy quotations from other writers on subjects pertaining to mortality and suicide and writing; an entire chapter on her work with abused women who used writing for therapy; the story of her reluctant falling in love with the silent and undemonstrative Apollo; and her reflections on the purpose of writing, who should be (and not be) a writer, what is wrong with kids today who insist on becoming writers, and hints on how to write.

The narrator quotes another writer (one she dislikes), who refers to one of his own works: "It's a novel because I say it is."  Nunez would presumably agree.  The Friend doesn't read like a conventional novel, but it's hard to find another category for it.  Call it a novel.

Just as I'm trying to decide whether The Friend is a fictional memoir or an autobiographical novel, I hit the second to the last chapter, where the narrator is talking to her older friend and mentor -- now very much alive, although recovering from an unsuccessful suicide attempt.  She confesses that she is writing a novel based on his suicide attempt, and on their long friendship.  And on her relationship with his dog.  She explains the many liberties she's taken with the facts, in order to prevent readers from discerning her friend's identity.  For example, in real life, the Great Dane Apollo is a dachshund named "Jip."

"In real life"?  But, of course, this supposedly self-revelatory chapter is also part of the novel.  Like a scene in a Bergman movie showing a camera and staff filming the scene.

The Friend is filled with wonderful lines worth quoting -- some by other authors, many by Ms. Nunez herself.  For example, the poet Rilke's advice to a young writer:

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work.  Seek solitude; above all seek solitude.

Advice that Ms. Nunez herself apparently lives by.  Especially the seeking of solitude.  The narrator describes her present-day students' hatred of writing as a profession -- hatred of the profession by the very students studying writing.   They claim that polished skill, discipline, even correct punctuation and spelling, are all exclusive elitist objectives:

To become a professional writer in our society you have to be privileged to begin with, and the feeling is that privileged people shouldn't be writing anymore -- not unless they can find a way not to write about themselves because that only furthers the agenda of white supremacy and the patriarchy.  You scoff, but you can't deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity.  

Throughout the novel, we watch the growing love affair between the narrator and the dog Apollo, two "persons" who are both grieving for the same man.  She finally discovers the best way to calm Apollo and make him content -- to read aloud to him  This exercise apparently brings back Apollo's happy memories of life with his beloved scholar-adopter.

The book is short, it can be read aloud in about two hours.  But soon Apollo has dropped off, like a child at whose bedside a mother has been reading and waiting for precisely this moment to tiptoe away.  I'm not tiptoeing anywhere.  Pinned beneath his weight, my feet have gone numb.  I wiggle them and he wakes.  Without getting up he seeks my hand, still holding the little book, and he licks it.

Both Nunez and her narrator admit to being cat people.  The narrator hadn't been eager to adopt the dog  -- the huge dog -- that her friend had left to her.  But, although she was almost evicted from her apartment, where pets were forbidden, she never dreamed of getting rid of Apollo.  Eventually, she admits, she sometimes found herself taking the taxi home from work, rather than the subway, just to see Apollo faster.

Almost all love stories between a child and a dog, or even an adult and a dog, end in sadness.  An impending sadness foreshadowed by the narrator throughout this book.  Apollo was already getting up there in years when the narrator took him in.  The fact that dogs are mortal, and that his eventual death was inevitable, is mentioned on numerous occasions.

But when it happens, it twists your guts.

Many on-line commentators love the book as a dog story, but dislike being distracted by Nunez's philosophical ramblings and professional interests.  The Friend definitely is a dog story, but the dog story is part of -- an illustration of, maybe -- Nunez's concern with broader issues of life and death, and of her interest in writing as a way in which writers manage the difficulties and fears one encounters in life.  The book won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.

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¹Alexandra Alter, New York Times (December 13, 2018)