The Friend
by Sigrid Nunez
Summary
A writer's oldest friend, her teacher and lifelong complicated love, kills himself, and among the things he leaves unresolved is Apollo, a harlequin Great Dane of enormous size and advancing years, whom wife three cannot keep. The narrator, a woman alone in a rent stabilized Manhattan studio of five hundred square feet, in a building that does not allow dogs, takes him in, temporarily, she insists, and the novel is what happens next, which is everything and almost nothing: a woman, a dog the size of a sofa, a grief they decline to perform, and eviction gathering politely in the background.
Nunez writes it as one continuous address to the dead man, in numbered sections that move the way a mourning mind moves: memories of the friend, a brilliant, vain, three times married professor of the old literary type, whose seductions of students read differently now and whom the narrator loves anyway, without illusion; arguments with his widows; scenes from the writing workshops she teaches, rendered with lethal comedy; and, threaded through everything, reading, Rilke, Ackerley's dog book, Coetzee, the literature of suicide and of animals, folded in so naturally that the book doubles as a commonplace collection.
At its centre, wordless and enormous, Apollo grieves too, sleeping on the bed, listening to her read aloud, and their alliance becomes the tenderest portrait of cross species love in recent fiction, sentimentality refused on every page and feeling arriving anyway.
Around two hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want a novel that thinks on every page, about grief, writing and dogs, and lands its emotion precisely because it never begs for it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, and it was the sweetest kind of prize story: Sigrid Nunez was sixty seven, seven novels and more than two decades into a career of impeccable obscurity, the writer's writer par excellence, and the award made her, by her own amused account, an overnight success decades in the making. The Times later ranked the book among the century's hundred best.
Its essayistic first person, fiction conducted as thinking, put it at the front of the decade's autofiction conversation, though Nunez had been writing that way since before the term existed; Sempre Susan, her memoir of youth spent in Susan Sontag's household, is the biographical key readers usually reach for next.
What Are You Going Through followed in the same voice, and the 2024 film of The Friend, with Naomi Watts and a scene stealing Great Dane, carried the little book to its widest audience. The dog, everyone agrees, survives adaptation.