The Friend by Sigrid Nunez 2019 Virago

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When the narrator unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the large Great Dane he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, and by the threat of eviction the dog harbors, as dogs are prohibited in her building.

Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog”s care, and determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, the narrator comes dangerously close to unravelling, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, the novel is about the deep bounds of friendship its title suggests.

This book received a hugely positive critical response: it was listed as one of the New York Times Best books of the 21st century; won the 2018 National Book award, and was described generally in superlatives as a moving novel of grief and emotional depth, a delightful and delicious read.

And reader, upon first listen? I did not like it one bit.

When I noted my lack of enthusiasm, someone suggested that since the writing had been compared with that of one of my most favorite writers, Virginia Woolf, they were surprised I had such a grumpy reaction to it.

Both Woolf and Nunez write about death, about grief, and ultimately about writing itself. What appeals to me in Woolf’s characters, the artist Lily Briscoe and her plight, and not Nunez’s unnamed writer? Initially, I thought perhaps it was a matter of character development. Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay and Lily interact, seem real somehow in a way Nunez’s narrator did not for me.  But is that really true? I am not sure. 

Perhaps it is a matter of prose style, or referentiality. I was a bit irritated at the abundance of literary allusions, even though I recognized most of them; however, some of the group enjoyed them. 

Perhaps, and here I am most sure, it was the masculinist space of the writing world she describes. The novel is fully engaged in the world of the professional writer and the profession of writing and teaching writing. I was both put off and bored by the male womanizing writing professor and the near fandom of his many students, particularly the women. This reminds me of a world I have been proximal to but have never been interested, let alone been fascinated by. I find the heated self conscious and self important literariness decidedly unerotic and intellectually dull. I cared only about  Apollo, the great Dane rather than any of the human characters that populated the novel.

In contrast, some members appreciated the friendly relation between the woman and her mentor, a friendship primarily based on intellectual conversation and shared intelligence. Despite, or perhaps because of, their different professional alignments, many found relatable truths in the novel’s portrayals of the friendship of a writer and her mentor. 

While I remain unmoved by the mentor relationship or the literary world the novel engages, with some consideration and attention to the groups’ insightful observations, I began to realize I had missed what most interested them, and what in retrospect I realize is the novel’s great strength: its meditations on grief, and particularly its moving engagement with grief after a suicide. Here are two quotes about grief that moved readers:

Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much.

But how would it be if that feeling was gone?

I would not want that to happen.

I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.

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.

It is this thematic center of the novel that touched most of the group.

On the whole, members of the group are glad we read this novel, and because our experiences differed so much, our discussion was lively. 

Some members considered the entire account of Apollo a narrative conceit to make sense of her mentor’s suicide attempt and are convinced the reality is the embedded account of her visit to the man with the dachshund who survived the attempted suicide and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. 

This is a novel about writing and what it does; passages comment for example on the role of writing and memory:

You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there’s always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they’ve traveled to are in fact only memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve.

We talked about the many ways we use writing to process and record our experience and feelings, from private diaries and journals to memoirs or for accounts we have inherited or are creating for others.

The Friend touched each of us and led to lively discussion. I may even need to read it again.