What kind of friend – oh shame on you. Words fail you, I see. I'm amazed that you can even look me in the face. And did I hear you right, about a dog? The dog is a major character? Please say nothing bad happens to the dog.
I'm not surprised that The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction for 2018: it's an inventive bit of storytelling that stretches the novel form in a way that's sure to appeal to literary juries. Yet it's also a perceptive treatise on grief and friendship, humanity and connection, and that has much appeal for this average reader, too. Sigrid Nunez's sentences might be “spare and elegiac”, but the whole is deeply philosophical, a perfect snapshot of our times, and lays bare the writing profession in a way that doesn't feel cute or irony-laden. I liked everything about this book.
I don't want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It's a cliché, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial – people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words – the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.As the book opens, the narrator is attending the memorial of her oldest friend and writing mentor; a successful novelist and retired writing instructor who unexpectedly took his own life. Soon, this friend's current (third) wife contacts the narrator to say that her late husband had expected her to take custody of his aging Great Dane, and despite the management of her small Manhattan rent-controlled apartment of thirty years not allowing dogs, she reluctantly agrees to take in the massive, mourning animal. Not much happens plot-wise – the narrator walks the dog to the amusement of bystanders; she goes to a therapist to deal with her grief; she teaches writing classes and bemoans her students – but the narrative focuses on this woman's inner life: an unending reel of memories, conversations with the dead, and literary allusions. The tone is private and spontaneous, like diary entries, and felt so real that I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading fiction.
Much of the narrator's musings are about the changes that have occurred in the writing world over the years: her dead friend had been a philanderer and a womanizer, often sleeping with his students (they met when she was his student many years before), and before he retired, this one-time object of much desire was officially reprimanded for calling his female students “dear”. He had to listen to new students telling him that his privileged white voice ought to be silenced to make room for more diversity, and he watched as Knausgaard-style non-fiction-fiction began to be regarded as the only authentic voice (which again prompted me to remember that I was actually reading fiction-fiction). And I liked all that Nunez had to say about this shift (and especially since her narrator sees value in many of the changes, if not in her students' refusal to embrace spelling and grammar rules).
Oh, you knew that a lot of people, including other writers would accuse you of being precious. Some would say that, after all, the one sure way for an artist to know his work has failed is if everyone “got” it. But the truth was, you had become so dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading that something had happened that you had thought never could happen: you had started not to care whether people read you or not. And though you knew your publisher would spit in your eye for saying so, you were inclined to agree with whoever it was who said that no truly good book would find more than three thousand readers.Many techniques that can feel too tricksy and deliberate to me are handled well in this book; I even liked that the narrator uses the second-person when addressing her dead friend, which would usually annoy me. I especially liked the many, many quotes from and stories about other authors, and since the narrator and her friend would have had countless discussions on books and authors, it was all totally organic to the narrative. Something happens late in the book that recasts some events in an engaging way, and I appreciate the artistry of that. And just in case another reader is worried that this is an I-saved-a-dog-and-the-dog-saved-me-back mawkish tearjerker, it's really not.
Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.I did like The Friend very much and would give it four and a half stars if I could. After much debate with myself about the value of my precious fifth star, I'm rounding down, but only just.
Funny to me to have read this right after Asymmetry: I think that this is the book that that one was trying to be.
