This weird little novel is a letter of sorts to friendship, grief, and dogs. The narrator is an unnamed woman (most of the characters are unnamed, except the dog) who has recently lost her longtime friend and mentor to suicide. They were both writers, him perhaps the more successful, or at the least the more gregarious one. A longtime professor, he started out as her teacher and their dynamic carries that slight imbalance through.
Our narrator is devastated by his death and the end of this friendship which has lasted her all through her adult life. While she has remained unmarried, he is married to his third wife when he dies and has always seemed to have a woman attached. The book is written as a sort of letter to this man who we never quite meet on the page as the narrator pours out her grief and its aftermath to her missing friend. It’s clear that she adores him but that he was a flawed human, particularly when it came to his interactions with students. All of this casts a questioning light on their relationship and history and just how clear-eyed she can possibly be about who he really was.
At the centre of the novel is the dog. The dog that belonged to her friend and who, after his death, comes to live with her. She does not particularly want a dog. She cannot have a dog in her apartment. And this is a lot of dog – a Great Dane in fact. But she says yes to taking the dog. She rearranges her life around the dog, even to the point of risking the loss of her reasonably priced New York apartment. I want to say she becomes obsessed with this dog but the dog is a fairly obvious stand-in for grief.
The book is meandering and thoughtful and kind of plotless but there is enough tension that I did want to keep reading (or listening in this case) and find out what happened to this woman and her animal.
Karissa Reads Books 
This weirdly reminds me of that Diane Keaton movie in which she is a businesses in a big city whose cousin or something dies, and she is listed as the next of kin to take this dead woman’s baby. Hilarity ensues.
Good friends of ours asked to list us as the guardians of their children in case something happened to both of them. They both had siblings but all were younger/not very responsible. We realized that in a movie the most irresponsible sibling would have been appointed and then would have learned a valuable lesson. Which makes for a fun movie but a terrible parenting choice.
And in real life I’ve met many people who are now raising kids who are not their own even though the kid’s parents aren’t dead. Wild stuff happens, and having kids in a safe place is key.
Peter has siblings that are not biologically his but his parents were their guardians. (They are adults now.) So we’ve always taken that sort of thing very seriously because it absolutely does happen. Even these friends I mentioned before, took us off as their kids guardians because they ended up moving away. We’re still friends but they decided someone who lived closer and was more integrated in their kids’ daily lives made more sense and I think that was really wise.
Hmm this does sound like a strange little book. I tend to enjoy these, although it sounds like it would have worked better as a short story in a collection
You’re right, it would have been perfect as a short story.
[…] The Friend – Sigrid Nunez […]