This is by Sigrid Nunez (who was born in New York in the early 1950s, the child of a Panamanian Chinese father and a German war-bride mother, which should be a novel in itself, as indeed it is: Nunez's first book is autobiographical, and MUST now be read).

The Friend was published in 2018, and won the National Book Award for Fiction that year, but I first came across it when it came in at No. 68 on the NYT's 2024 list of the best 100 books of the century so far.

The TL;DR version of this post is that I absolutely devoured The Friend. Loved it. Loved the tone; loved the material. Raved about it to everyone. And have enjoyed going back and revisiting it weeks later (such is the time lag at the moment between reading and posting).



The story as such can be recounted very briefly. The narrator is a writer, and her narrative is addressed to a friend (another writer) who has just committed suicide. The two go back a long way, and it's probably best to let Nunez describe the relationship:

"By the time he actually takes his life, [the narrator and the dead friend have] fallen a bit out of touch, but they have known each other for decades. And although he was her professor, he was not much older than her. They’re basically the same age, same generation. She was a writing and literature student of his. And she did have an enormous crush on him. He was not in love with her. They had sex this one time. They were good friends before, and they remained good friends after, even though she was humiliated that he never wanted to be with her romantically again. And then he had three wives, and all three marriages ended with him being estranged from those women. Meanwhile, because they did not have a marriage, she and he were able to stay close. He was one of her oldest friends, somebody she greatly admired as a writer and as a thinker. And I don’t think their friendship was anything unique. In fact, many people have good friends they’ve known for a long time whom they might have felt romantically about at one time. It was a deep friendship, but there was nothing very unusual about it."

I'm actually not sure that's true, but anyway...

Although the narrator insists she never had her heart broken by this man, we're not sure we believe her. Certainly, she remained single her whole life. According to Nunez, "It’s clear that she could fall in love with him all over again at any time."

For sizeable chunks of the narrative, the bereaved woman is addressing her dead mentor. The tone is intimate, full of grief and regret and bemusement. It works really well.

The dead man, formerly also an academic (he stopped teaching the previous year), doesn't necessarily sound like someone I'd like. He was a bit of a dinosaur, at least where women were concerned. Between wives, there were girlfriends. Between girlfriends, there were one-night stands.

Students complained at being addressed as "dear":

"One of those rare times that we fought.
"Me: Just because no one ever said anything didn’t mean no one objected.
"You: Well, if they didn’t say anything, they didn’t object, did they?"

In the past he'd had a series of relationships with students and former students. He never saw anything wrong with that... But then his heart is broken by a 19.5-year-old, and it's all a bit pathetic: "By now it has become a pattern: young women who are willing to fuck you but who share none of the desire that drives you to them. What drives them instead is narcissism, the thrill of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees."

He recovers, starts writing again. But somehow, things have started to slide.

Anyway, he commits suicide, and that's always devastating for those around. He leaves no note. (Why, muses the narrator, do we call it a note?)



And Wife Three asks the narrator to take charge of the grieving dog, Apollo... She reluctantly agrees. Initially an abandoned dog, he'd been adopted by the dead man. The narrator can't contemplate the prospect of his having to be euthanized.

But it's not easy. Apollo is a Great Dane, and clearly missing his owner. And he's old. Plus, she's technically not allowed to have a dog in her apartment, and risks eviction...

At this point, the narrator comments: "There's a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?" And I (not at all a dog person) made the following note in the text: "That person is not me."

But actually I DID start to care about the dog. So there we are... A magnificent tribute to the author's powers.

Apollo becomes more and more trouble. But to the grieving narrator, he provides a focus. He is someone she HAS to take care of.

She is struggling with life -- forgetting things, breaking down unexpectedly. And her friends see the whole sacrificing-the-apartment-for-the-dog thing as insane: "They want me to come to my senses before it’s too late. I need a better way to cope with my feelings of loss and guilt. I need bereavement therapy. Here are some names. I should think about medication. Here’s what worked for them. There are books. There are websites. There are support groups. Healing won’t come from withdrawing into a fantasy world, isolating myself, spending all my time with a dog. There is such a thing as pathological grief. There is the magical thinking of pathological grief, which is a kind of dementia. Which in their collective opinion is what I have."

She starts reading aloud to the dog. Which he really enjoys. Maybe someone used to read to him in his pre-abandonment days, she thinks. She reads him Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (which, coincidentally, was already on my TBRI read). Rilke's definition of love: "Two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other." How beautiful... By the end, the narrator is thinking: "What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?" Awww...

To get round the tenancy regulations, she registers Apollo as a "service animal". It's a fudge, technically. But actually he IS an animal who provides a service...


There are many sunsets in this novel. People, animals, intellectual environments...

At one point the narrator imagines how the story could have ended differently. How it could have been about a failed suicide attempt, and how she could have confessed to the would-have-been suicide that she is writing about this event. She imagines her dead friend saying: "Did I hear you right...? The DOG is a major character? Please say nothing bad happens to the dog."

There follows a page marked only: "DEFEAT THE BLANK PAGE!" It's all very well imagining different outcomes... But wat happens to us happens, and we have to deal with it.

And so we arrive at the final chapter.

The narrator and the dog are away, staying by the beach. By now she's in awe of canine powers: "My anxiety about classes starting up again in a week. My open wounds. My hidden fears. My loneliness. My rage. My never-ending grief. You can smell all that."

But the dog is visibly aging. Life in the apartment building is getting more awkward. There are more and more accidents, and her home is starting to smell. So a kind friend offers her this beach place. For a break. While her apartment is cleaned up.

She is still living with profound grief. She doesn't want to always be in pain. But then she doesn't want to forget either. The conundrum of being a finite human...

She thinks about the woman who once lived in this beachside home. She's now almost completely disabled, and incapable of remembering the elements of her previous life: "It's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad. 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 of what we wanted in life but never got to have." True. But hard. Very hard.

The dog is lying down. A swarm of butterflies swoops by. They ignore the dog:

"The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore.
"I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat.
"Oh, my friend, my friend!"

Which friend? Both friends...



***

So this in itself is a fascinating little cameo -- of grief, of dedication, of healing (or at least partial healing).

But this little book is so much more. There's such a lot of fascinating stuff about writing, for example.

The act of writing raises moral questions about whether we're justified in recording others' trauma -- or others' lives in any shape or form. People who write tend to quote Milosz: "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." It's also a highly competitive (sometimes vicious) business, and a recipe for frustration and self-doubt. The narrator talks of a friend whose Buddhist commitments begin to ease her away from writing, and who starts to wonder whether the novel she is no longer working on will ever be missed: "Weren’t there, in fact, already too many novels? Did I honestly think mine would be missed? And could I justify doing something with my life, my one wild and precious life, that I knew, undone, would not be missed?"

And then there is the climate of the day. All our sensitivities, for example. One writing teacher complains: "Now everyone's afraid of offending someone, triggering something." Another noteworthy statistic, from the narrator's point of view: "In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can't read."

Today we contend with general wave of suspicion about writing. In the "alternative ending" the narrator imagines for the story -- the one where she's talking to a man who has survived his suicide attempt -- she comments: "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." The imaginary friend who has survived agrees: "The privileged shouldn’t write about themselves, because that furthers the agenda of the imperialist white patriarchy. But they also shouldn’t write about other groups, because that would be cultural appropriation." Tricky...

And here the extraordinarily perspicacious comments about writing also start to cover academia more generally. Again addressing the dead man, the narrator says: "I recite your various gripes, which were not much different from those heard every day from other teachers: how even students from top schools didn’t know a good sentence from a bad one, how nobody in publishing seemed to care how anything was written anymore, how books were dying, literature was dying, and the prestige of the writer had sunk so low that the biggest mystery of all was why everyone and their grandmother was turning to authorship as just the ticket to glory."

Her dead friend, she comments, had "become so dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading" that he had started not to care whether people read his work or not.

At one point, says the narrator, they both "believed that writing was the best thing we could ever hope to do with our lives". But lately he had started telling his students "that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it".



***

It's a terribly erudite book in its own modest, low-key way. The reading list that derives from this one is enormous: Georges Simenon; J.M. Coetzee; Ursula K. Le Guin; J.R. Ackerley; Svetlana Alexievich; Elmore Leonard... This is not only a novel about grief, and loss, and love, and dogs. It's a novel about books.

There's lots about suicide, of course... It weaves its way through the entire discourse.

According to Nunez, much of The Friend is autobiographical, with "not a great amount of distance between the writer and the narrator". She enlarges on this here: "Before I started writing [The Friend], I was aware that any number of people I knew had it in their heads that they might commit suicide. They weren’t making a cry for help. They weren’t making an attempt. I’m not talking about that kind of situation. But they had thought how they would leave this life at some time. And that struck me as quite remarkable. I had finished the book when one of those people did commit suicide..." (That same interview is also great on Nunez's family background and literary technique.)

***

All up, a splendid book. Compassionate, mesmerizing, and extraordinarily rewarding.