The Friend

'The Friend' was a remarkable listening experience. It's an intimate six-hour long monologue, spoken to a dead friend. That probably sounds a little dull, perhaps even a bit of chore to listen to but that wasn't my experience at all. To me it felt like one of those rare occaisions when you meet someone new and fascinating so you spend the whole day and long into the night listening to them talk, building a picture of them. lost in who they are becoming in your mind.

'The Friend' is such a wonderful, effortless flow of remembrance and reflection that, at first, it hardly felt like grief, except that it was being spoken into a void, a presence lost and now, at best, imagined. I loved the narrator's taken-for-granted erudition, her show more seamlessly integrated wit, and her self-awareness which refused to let self-deception hold sway but insisted on trying to say only what was true.

The premise of the story seems simple enough. A man dies and bequeaths his harlequin great dane not to his wife but to the narrator, a woman he has known for far longer than his (third) wife. A woman he knows to be a cat person. A woman he knows is not allowed to have a dog in her Manhattan apartment. A woman he knows loves him enough to take the dog anyway. The bequest transforms the woman's life both by changing her here-and-now experience and by causing her to re-examine the truths embedded in her long-term relationship with the dead man.

In other hands, this could be the set-up for a Hallmark movie about a life redeemed by the love of a large dog. In Sigrid Nunez's hands, it becomes an excavation of a life, of choices made and lived with, of people living complex, sometimes over-examined lives, of the effects of time and age on passion and friendship and on how our identity is shaped by our memory of the past and our expectations of the future.

I was immersed in the story mostly because it didn't feel like a story. This wasn't a linear narrative designed to lead the reader to a climax through a three-act plot. This was about being in the narrator's head as she worked out what the man's death meant to her. In the process, I learned as much, maybe more, about her than about him. I learned how she came to be who she is and how she sees herself. She is an academic, prone to analysis and used to using literary references to frame her understanding of situations. She has a dry wit that often keeps her at a distance from others. She is mired so deeply in grief that it taints every thought and every memory. She can't forgive the dead man for being dead. She can't imagine the path of her life, free from the gravitational pull of his personality.

Sigrid Nunez's prose is wonderful. Not a word is wasted. Phrases that at first seem casual become charge with meaning as they are repeated or their context is revealed. I've already re-listened to the start of the book and I can see that the experience of the text, when you already know what the narrator knows, is different: richer, deeper but the truth of the narrative remains the same.

There was one section of the story that didn't work for me. It was an extended discussion between the narrator and the dead man about literature an publishing, about cultural appropriation and self-censorship and so on. It was a good discussion but I found it jarring. It took me out of the flow. It also seemed like lecture notes reconfigured into dialogue. Fortunately, it was a short section.

I haven't mentioned the dog. He is, of course, adorable. If you've lived with a dog as a family member you'll recognise the emerging relationship and the emotional attachment.

At the end of the book, I found myself thinking about the title. It has the same complex simplicity as the story. It's up to the reader to work out who the friend is and what being a friend means.

I recommend listening to the audiobook version of 'The Friend'. Hilary Huber's narration perfectly captures the tone of the monologue. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudiouk/the-friend-by-sigrid-nunez-read-by-hillar... show less

This was so awful that I actually googled the National Book Awards to see what the ever-loving-blue-eyed-heck the criteria for winning were. I seriously wondered if this were an award that "sounded" like a legit one, but was actually something Ms. Nunez created and then awarded to herself.

What I found was this criticism of the NBA: "...the fiction award has become a Newbery Medal for adults: Good for you whether you like it or not. ...the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention. the nominated books [often] exhibit qualities – a poetic prose style, elliptical or fragmented storytelling – that either don't matter much show more to nonprofessional readers, or even put them off....the NBA has become irrelevant to average readers and of more interest to professional writers..."the National Book Awards [are] known for this sort of thing. They're awards for insiders."

YES! "The Friend" is a perfect example of "Awards For Insiders". A chance for them to form a circle and--um--pat each other on the back.

The book is self-absorbed navel-gazing from beginning to --- whatever you would call the final page. So unbearably pretentious!

I'm smacking myself on the forehead repeatedly, and mumbling, "Why? Why? WHY didn't I listen to my instincts and ditch this thing earlier?" I combined (1) the hope that maybe it would have something to do with the dog (and not just her egocentric musings about how the dog's presence affects HER), with (2) the book award winner stamp on the cover--surely eventually this would become worth reading, wouldn't it?? Spoiler Alert: No. Thank goodness for the public library! show less

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a subtly remarkable novel that tells a stark, unsentimental tale of grief and healing. The narrator, an unnamed middle-aged woman, teaches writing at a New York university. She has lost a very close friend to suicide and is suffering a profound, almost debilitating, sense of loss. The woman’s dead friend was a writer, a successful novelist and teacher of creative writing. The long-standing connection between this man and woman was intellectual and platonic, and their conversations provided a stimulus that fed and nurtured their own writing. The complication that changes the narrator’s life and propels the story arises when the friend’s wife at the time of his death (“Wife Three”) asks her to take show more the dog. The dog, Apollo—a Dane mastiff, not young, stately and serene by nature—is a rescue dog, discovered by the friend unaccompanied in a park and, following a cursory search for the owner, impulsively adopted, against Wife Three’s wishes. The narrator resists—arguing that 1) she is a “cat person,” (though catless at the moment), that 2) Apollo is a very large animal who will suffer confined to a very small apartment, and that 3) her apartment building does not allow dogs. But the next thing we know, she is defying the building’s policy by taking Apollo in, and they are developing a routine of long companionable walks and respectful co-habitation. The tale that follows—rooted in the narrator’s friendship with the dead man and her growing affection for Apollo—is in fact a meditation on a variety of subjects which meanders gracefully and poignantly but always circles back to themes linked to creativity, dying and death. Along the way the narrator refers liberally to works by other writers, notably Rilke, Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and J.R. Ackerley (author of the memoir My Dog Tulip), from which she gains insight into the situation in which she finds herself. The brilliance of The Friend is difficult to pinpoint as due to any single aspect of the narrative because the story is comprised of many loosely woven threads that only gradually come together. But it is, in the end, a masterful and unforgettable work of fiction that packs a powerful emotional punch. show less

I figured this book was going to suffer from high expectations but nothing could be further from the truth. I loved it so much. It's a book about kinship and writing and love disguised as a book about a great dane. Reading it, I felt nostalgic for college weirdly, as much of the action takes place workshops and classrooms for writing students. I even wrote about this book in my fucking journal last night about how it intimidated me and inspired me. I'm glad I own it as I think it's a novel I'll want to reread again and again.

A woman loses her mentor and best friend unexpectedly. She takes on his unwanted dog despite her apartment building prohibiting animals. The dog’s suffering intensifies her grief amidst threat of eviction, leading to obsession and isolation with the dog.

I enjoyed reading THE FRIEND very much, though it was not at all what I anticipated based on the synopsis. What I thought would be a story exploring a woman’s bond with a dog through her grief journey ended up including much more of a meditation on the art of writing and the impact of loss and grief on this. Nunez’s writing was beautiful, compelling, and thought-provoking. This book will stick with me for some time to come.

Though not what I expected, THE FRIEND delivered an show more unforgettable read that I’d recommend to fans of literary fiction. show less

“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.”

“There's a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?”

“Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily.”

The set-up of this novel is pretty straight-forward- A woman loses her best friend to suicide show more and
ends up caring for his massive Great Dane, in her tiny apartment. The dog is also shell-shocked, with the loss of his beloved owner. How this unlikely pairing draw together, bringing each other support and comfort, is the heart of this story. A meditation on grief, companionship and survival. The writing is rich and beautiful. Book lovers and pet owners, will especially enjoy the deep collage of references. This one won the National Book Award and I see no problem with that. show less

"The Friend" is a very good novel. Let me rephrase that. "The Friend is a good novel despite the fact that its main character is an academic who liberally quotes major twentieth-century writers and thinkers. But even if you're sort of reader who recoils when they read about yet another main character who teaches at some MFA program at some Midwestern university, thereby proving that the oft-repeated dictum that you should write what you know is demonstrably wrong, you should give this one a chance. Even if you don't like dogs -- and trust me, I don't -- you should give give it a try.

The friend that is referred to in the title is both the central protagonist's former mentor, recently found dead by his own hand,, and man's best friend, in show more this case a Great Dane who, though he doesn't yet suffer the indignities of age, is rapidly getting on in (dog) years. There are other deaths here, too. The dog in question cannot process the death of its owner, while the main character, a teacher of creative writing at the university level, worries about the death of literature. I feel fairly confident that the awful and hilarious stories she tells about her newest students -- all of whom are digital natives who can barely remember a world without smartphones and barely seem to know what literature is even for -- are true.

We don't always expect to lose our friends in middle age: it's clear that our narrator did not, and neither, for that matter, did the Great Dane: it waited faithfully by the door for its departed master until his widow could take no more. If deaths that are chosen are especially heartbreaking, an enormous dog that she must take care of but whose presence she cannot fully explain in her life proves a remarkably apt metaphor for the enormous, irrational shock that a death like this can deliver. At the same time, the dog also represents a strange persistence here: we witness the Great Dane's dogged (oh, ha) insistence on surviving despite the genetically-determined odds, its vet's cold-eyed yet somehow comforting realism, and the very real and slightly ridiculous physicality of a canine that's bigger and heavier than many human beings. In another sort of book, the narrator might have been left with an elephant or giraffe that she didn't know how to care for.

Grief and grieving seem to be hot topics these days, and perhaps in the wake of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans, that's hardly a surprise. But our narrator's delicate yet steadily improving attempts to adjust and appreciate her new roommate -- or life partner? -- also serve as a splendid metaphor for the slow, unwilling adjustments we are forced to make to death and finality, even though our narrator knows that her relationship with the "Dogge" will necessarily be a short one. Her introduction of Wittgenstein's definition of love "two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other" and the dog's genuinely affecting death scene -- which reminded me of nothing so much as the elegant, melancholy, beachy setting of "To the Lighthouse" -- suggests that the author knows how to borrow from the greats without seeming at all pretentious. This one's a worthy recipient of whatever prizes it might have been awarded. show less