To me, this novel is also about the strangeness of “I” and “you.”Īs a part of this, The Friend shows pet ownership at its most thrillingly melancholic. “Having your dog is like having a part of you here,” the narrator says at one point. The happening is its thinking, and The Friend, portentous of a peaking trend in the modern blend of fiction and memoir, is less about its programmatic, memoir-like intellectuality (Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others are mentioned) than about what its fictive reality can affect in the reader, namely, grief, anxiety, joy.

As the narrator says, “And just because there are other people who’ve lost someone to suicide doesn’t mean that what I’m feeling is something that can be shared.”Įven with that ethereal loss at its center, the “novel” doesn’t demand that something else happen, not really. The novel focuses on the unnamed protagonist’s relationship with her late mentor’s Great Dane, Apollo, which comes to resemble a “marriage.” And it is a marriage, but a unique one, bred by longing for something that won’t be there and can’t be there. His dog soothes her they sleep in the same bed he is a constant reminder of the man she misses.” At first glance, this is a bare, if not lovable, plot.īut The Friend is about much more: contemporary autofiction, contemporary fiction, creative writing programs, overdue #MeToo reckonings, suicide, literary suicide(s), grief, and dog-human relationships. The woman grieves for her friend, who was her mentor and, if only once, her lover. Dwight Garner does a good job in the New York Times, though: “This novel’s tone in general, however, is mournful and resonant. Just in time for the National Book Award ceremony tomorrow, we’d like to share an appreciation for one of the nominees in fiction.Įditorial Assistant Matt Morgenstern: It’s difficult to summarize Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, published earlier this year by Riverhead (and nominated for this year’s National Book Award).

The friend a novel by sigrid nunez