Book Report: The Friend

6. Sigrid Nuñez, The Friend (2018) (3/23/19)

The National Book Award–winning The Friend is an oddly moving book, exploring love, loss, and pain as well as literature, aesthetics, cultural expectations, and the gap—or rather bridge—between humanity and animals. Framed as a sort of journal-slash-letter to a close friend who has committed suicide, the book explores, sometimes in brief one-thought paragraphs, other times in longer accounts of specific memories or events, the nameless female author's relationship to the nameless male friend and mentor, both of them fifty-ish writers and teachers. There is also a dog, a 180-pound harlequin Great Dane named Apollo, whom the writer has inherited and must share her 500-square-foot apartment with, illicitly (she lives in rent-controlled Manhattan).

There's no real plot to speak of: it's largely a novel of ideas and impressions. The dialogue is not novelistic, but rather chunks of prose within quotation marks. There is relatively little descriptive detail. The book is divided into twelve "parts." The first begins with the last conversation the author and dead friend ever had, moves into his memorial service and a general, unflattering description of the friend—he was an unrepentant womanizer, one might say lacking in maturity—and ends with the conversation with Wife Three in which the author learns that she will be giving Apollo a new home. The next nine chapters range through, among other things, examinations of literature (J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and J. R. Ackersley's My Dog Tulip, for example, both of them featuring dogs in a sorry fashion—but many, many writers, from Proust to Flannery O'Connor, Virginia Woolf to Heinrich von Kleist appear, even if only briefly); the act of writing as confession or catharsis; the nature of attachment, in part through the lens of human sex trafficking (the object of the author's research); political correctness and the notion that the world can be made "safe"
. . . and quite a bit about the nature of dogs: their opinions, their yearnings, their anxieties, their regrets, their sweet, sweet—or bittersweet—memories. Which, of course, reflect immediately back on the author—or, humanity writ large.

Not to give anything away, but the final two chapters bring the book onto a new plane and relieve some of the angst of the previous musings. They leave the reader feeling lighter and, dare I say, both glad to be alive and feeling a little more careful to enjoy this life as fully as possible.

Here is a brief discourse on the life (and expectations) of a writer (the "you" in the following is the dead friend):

I remember the interviewer asked the usual question about audience, whether you wrote with a particular reader in mind. Which set you off about the relationship between writer and reader and how much that relationship had changed. As a young writer you'd been told, Never assume your reader isn't as intelligent as you are. Advice you'd taken to heart. You wrote with that reader in mind, you said, someone as smart as—or why not even smarter than!—yourself. Someone intellectually curious, who had the habit of reading, who loved books as much as you did. Who loved fiction. And then, with the internet, had come the possibility of reading the responses of actual readers, among whom you were pleased to find some who did indeed match, more or less, the reader in your head. But there were others—not just one or two but quite a number when you added them up—who had misread, or misunderstood, in some cases quite seriously, what you'd said. Troubling enough when the reader was someone who'd hated the book, but that was far from always the case. Like other writers you now found yourself regularly damned or praised for things that had never occurred to you, things you had never expressed and never would express, things that represented pretty much the opposite of what you actually believed.
 . . . You got customer reviews full of umbrage, suggesting that if a book didn't affirm what the reader already felt—what they could identify with, what they could relate to—the author had no business writing the book at all. Those hilarious stories that people loved, and loved to share—the book clubber who said, When I read a novel I want someone to die in it; the complaint against Anne Frank's diary, in which nothing much happens and then the story just breaks off—did not make you laugh. 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 had failed was 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.

And what dog owner (and perhaps cat guardian as well) can't identify with this close to chapter 8?

Watching Apollo sleep. The peaceful rise and fall of his flank. His belly is full, he is warm and dry, he has had a four-mile walk today. As usual when he hunched in the street to do his business I guarded him from passing cars. And, in the park, when a texting jogger bore down on us, Apollo barked and blocked his path before he could run into me. I have played several rounds of tug-of-war with him today, I have talked to him, and sung to him, and read him some poetry. I have trimmed his nails and brushed every inch of his coat. Now, watching him sleep, I feel a surge of contentment. There follows another, deeper feeling, singular and mysterious, yet at the same time perfectly familiar. I don't know why it takes a full minute for me to name it.
 What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?
 It is good to have things settled. Miracle or no miracle, whatever happens, nothing is going to separate us.