January 2022: The Friend (Nunez)

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend is an introspective and unassuming novel about friendship, loss, and the art of writing. As the book begins, the narrator is reeling from the suicide of her best friend and mentor, a fellow writer and teacher who had once been her professor. Consumed by grief and finding it impossible to work, she returns again and again to thoughts about her friend, his death, and the lifework that they had in common. Her friend’s widow (and third wife) pressures her to house the man’s 180lb Great Dane, Apollo, in her 500 square foot New York apartment, even though dogs are forbidden in the building. At first, she is at a loss about what to do with the dog, whose grief at the death of his master seems almost as great as her own. Slowly, however, the two form an intense bond, and she adds reflections about canine-human connections to her cyclical ruminations about friendship, suicide, death, trauma, and writing. However, as Great Dane is impossible to hide, she is soon threatened with eviction.

The suspense over whether the narrator will lose her home drives the plot forward, but only half-heartedly so. For the most part, the narrator ignores the issue, and the steps she takes to address it are never placed center stage. This is not a book about actions; it is a book about reactions. The narrator analyses and dissects emotions and events in a way that perhaps only a writer truly can. The book takes us on a journey, but it is an intellectual and emotional voyage, rather than a physical one.

The novel contains many passages on writers and writing and on recent cultural changes in the literary community. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the book has appealed to so many critics. The New York Times commented that “Nunez has won over the literary world” with her “dead-on depiction” “of “writers and their discontents.” The Kirkus review called it “[b]reathtaking both in pain and beauty: a singular book.” Elilis Ni Dhuibhne, of the Irish Times, credits it with renewing the genre of novel writing, by giving us a refreshing, innovative, and “absolutely delightful” novel “that has the qualities of a memoir.” In 2018, The National Book Foundation selected The Friend for its National Book Award for Fiction.

Despite this praise and recognition, reactions to the book amongst our members were mixed. Although several members really enjoyed the book and found its portrayals of friendship compelling, several people found the book unappealing and difficult to get through. Some thought the numerous literary references became tiresome and pompous. Others were frustrated by the narrator’s lack of action in response to the issues she was facing. Readers feel increasingly weighed down by the narrator’s grief as the days stretch to weeks and then to months and years. Why doesn’t she do more about it? Why can’t she, and the narrative, move on?

Perhaps, someone speculated, it would have been better if we understood why the narrator’s grief was so deep and so long-lasting? This was just a friend, not a lover, someone pointed out, and by all accounts he wasn’t even a very appealing person. We hear about his womanizing, about his three marriages and his persistent affairs, often with his own students. We don’t hear enough, perhaps, about the charisma that drew people to him and about the intellectual companionship that he shared with the narrator. He seemed self-centered, some concluded, and her grief seemed self-indulgent.

Having enjoyed the book quite a lot, I was surprised at first by these reactions. However, the more I thought about it, the more I thought they fit with the spirit of the novel. The novel is not autobiographical, and although Nunez lost a friend to suicide while writing the book, she was inspired to write it because so many people she knew were contemplating suicide and because she wanted to write a book with an animal as a central character. Nonetheless, Nunez admits that she found aspects of her own thoughts and attitudes working their way into the book, especially as she explored the topic of writing and the changes in the writing community. Nunez’s “overnight success” with The Friend came after 23 years of writing and publishing. In part, she has not received more recognition before now because she is not interested in the processes of self-promotion that seem essential to publishing success. “I became a writer because it was something I could do alone in my room,” she once commented.

So, although the narrator in The Friend compares writers to vampires who prey on the lives of others, there can also be something very self-centered and self-indulgent about the writing process, just a some might argue their can be something very self-centered and self-indulgent about grief. So, even though Nunez book is very much about the deep connections that we can have with other humans and other animals, it is also about the relationship that we have with ourselves. I think that she recognizes that both writing and grieving can be intensely self-indulgent and self-centered enterprises, but that they can also give rise to some of our most intense connections. Although the narrator spends most of the book alone with Apollo, the book is full of references to other people. We share in their thoughts and traumas, and their trials and triumphs, through their writings or through things that have been written about them.

So even though the narrator is building all kinds of barriers between herself and the world, this isolation creates an opportunity for her to share the world with her readers in ways that I found profoundly thought-provoking and moving. Perhaps this delicate balance between the self and others is best captured by a passage where, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's definition of love, the narrator reflects on the growing affection between herself and her dog. "What are we, Apollo and I,” she writes, “if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?"