The Friend

This is a novel for writers, though you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate it.

The “friend” is an enormous Great Dane the narrator, a writer and teacher, inherits when the dog’s owner, her lifelong best friend and a famous writer, dies by suicide.

The narrator lives in my New York City neighborhood, in an apartment building that forbids dogs. This is a setup for hilarious complications, and the descriptions of her budding relationship with the dog (he likes being read to) made me want to have a dog, though I’m not a dog person.

I also loved… show more.

In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend a terrible event (a dear friend and mentor’s suicide) results in the unnamed narrator’s acceptance, out of a sense of responsibility, of an unwanted burden (the heartbroken Great Dane, Apollo−the narrator admitting she is more of a cat person).

I love that by book’s end, that obligation turns out to be a precious gift that assuages both their griefs, serving to connect them to the departed one they both loved. Along the way we, lucky readers, get to eavesdrop on the literary discourse of an agile mind attempting to parse the unparsable as the narrator,… show more.

One of my favorite novels of the past decade, Nunez is funny and incisive and uses a very fine, sharp knife to carve up the idea of the great American male novelist. And there is a huge Great Dane at the center of the novel. Nunez became well known after this novel won the National Book Award. I wish she was even more well-known. 

A dear and lifetime friend commits suicide. Instead of a note, he bequeaths to the narrator a large and faithful new friend, this one four-legged and furry. I delight in how the narrator gets inside the emotional subtleties of this new relationship and then explores other loves of people for their pets. A delicious metafictional spin to the end of this realistic tale (no spoilers here!) made me go back and read it from the beginning again.

Gosh, this book truly took my breath away. The story centers on a Great Dane that is left with the main character and how she becomes his reluctant caretaker. Nunez’s writing about the dog resonates with my own experiences of caring for companion animals. There are also profound observations about loneliness, grief, longing, communication, and friendship. It also rings true to the way caring for dogs structures your everyday life from walking to feeding times.

This short, beautiful novel is about a woman whose life changes in two major ways as the result of one event: her closest friend dies, and she inherits the enormous dog he has left behind. She doesn’t want the dog, and his presence raises a number of problems for her; in addition, both dog and human are reeling with the fallout of sudden grief and their mutual change of circumstances. But as time goes on, and she struggles to make sense of what has happened, she begins to find solace in the unexpected companionship. The book is at once moving… show more.

How is one to mourn the sudden death of a loved one? For the novel’s narrator, whose best friend has taken his own life, there’s writing. There’s therapy. And there’s the unexpected responsibility of caring for the friend’s one-hundred-and-eighty-pound harlequin Great Dane. Infused with wit and humor, the novel is a meditation on the friendship between people and between people and their dogs, who, the narrator says, “may well, in their mute unfathomable way, know us better than we know them.” I’m not alone in my praise. The Friend won the 2018 National Book Award for fiction.