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The Friend is the most recent novel by the writer Sigrid Nunez, which despite being her eighth novel, is responsible for catapulting her into the wider literary canon. The novel is told from the perspective of an aging writer and teacher, our narrator, who has just lost a beloved friend, also a writer and teacher, from suicide. Following his death, the narrator inherits his massive Great Dane, a majestic but lonely creature. The novel tracks how the narrator navigates life without her friend, and the grief she shares with the animal.
The dog, named Apollo, becomes the center of the narrator’s life, as he seems to be the only creature that shares in her mourning of the lost friend. The narrator marvels at Apollo’s patience and calm demeanor despite the frequent attention he receives from strangers. She sleeps in bed with him, reads to him, and walks him frequently. Apollo is one of the only characters named in the novel, and the richness in which his daily habits and quirks are described are only rivaled by the narrator’s conjuring of her lost friend. He is the most well rendered character I’ve come across in a long time.
The novel is in many ways about ownership, about the role that authority plays in writing and in real life. The narrator expresses her unease at owning a domesticated pet, about controlling the life of another being. She is deferent to Apollo, orienting her universe around him rather than the other way around, in an effort to reverse the power dynamic stemming from the fact that, “dogs, like other domesticated animals, have been bred to be dominated by people, to be used by people, to do what people want.” This dynamic is mirrored in the narrator’s mediations on the form of literature, and her conception of authorship in relation to the role of real people on the page. She writes, “After I put my mother in a novel she never forgave me. Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’t not for another to use it for fiction.” The narrator believes that her deceased friend would hate her book, would feel betrayed by her decision to profit off of their relationship by selling the book. Yet she writes anyway, and doesn’t offer any sort of explanation.
The narrator reflects on the many conversations she had with her friend, lamenting the demise of literature as a true art form. He tells her how each year he finds his students less imaginative, unable to engage with work they find morally dubious. The narrator never endorses this statement, she is conscious of the cultural factors that are changing the literary scene, but one gets the sense that she at least shares some concern with her friend about the increasingly commercial nature of book publishing, the departure from “art for art’s sake”. She offers a range of perspectives on the moral implications of writing, quoting those like Edna O’Brien who saw it as a vocation, and those like Janet Malcolm who called it “morally indefensible”. She also offers a variety of perspectives on the intersections of grief and writing, citing Natalia Ginzburg, who warned, “You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing”. So what is the narrator getting out of writing about grief? Because it is not closure, but something harder to grasp. This is what the book is about, the ways that writing, authorship, loss, grief, and connection intersect in a person’s life, and how difficult it is to reason out their points of intersection. Nunez in constantly negotiating her own and her narrator’s relationship with their medium, which avoids self-indulgence with a penetrating authenticity,
The book is also simply an affecting meditation on true companionship and the loss of it, a succinct novel that manages to fit many of the most puzzling quandaries about life into passages of exquisitely simple yet magnetic prose. The narrator repeats the refrain, “I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much,” throughout the novel. But following the final recitation of this refrain, she reflects, “But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen…It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.” This novel is about what it means to sit with grief, to meet it where it is, which feels so essentially human and renders this narrative absolutely unforgettable.