Generally, my aim in this blog is to take well-loved pop-culture staples (“Sex and the City,” “Bridesmaids”) and make you see them in a new, or newish, way. But occasionally I come across a sort-of-overlooked gem, and then, since people don’t really know about it, I don’t need to revise any assumptions. I just need to promote the gem. I did that with the movie “Columbus.” And now I’ll do it with the new novel, “The Friend,” by Sigrid Nunez.
Basically, this is a very funny, very sad novel about a woman lazily wondering whether she should end her own life. That’s never explicitly spelled out. But her close friend--an esteemed writer, whom she may have loved--has just offed himself. The woman--who seems to be a proxy for Sigrid Nunez (but is she, really?)--has few strong attachments in the social realm. Her love life seems not to exist. (She has some interesting thoughts about the habits of a flaneur. A male writer speculates that you can’t be a female flaneur, because if you’re female, you’re subject to cat-calls, and you can’t slip into the pleasant state of total abstraction that flaneur-life calls for. But Nunez says: You’re subject to cat-calls only when you are young. To be an older woman in America, in 2018, she suggests, is to be invisible.)
Anyway, the narrator’s friend dies, and he leaves his Great Dane to her. She doesn’t want the Great Dane--Apollo. She never asked for Apollo. She doesn’t have room for him. But no one else will take him. And he is traumatized; he was abandoned even before the great writer found him, and now of course he has been abandoned again. What follows is a love story between the Great Dane and the narrator--and it’s genuinely moving, without getting sappy. The narrator cares for the dog, and eventually the dog cares for the narrator; he earns an “emotional support animal” designation, and though it’s mainly a way of getting around a finger-wagging landlord, it’s also an accurate label.
While the narrator cares for the dog, and removes herself from social life, she thinks a great deal. She thinks about self-destruction. She says many people feel life would be unbearable without the option of suicide. She recalls a story about Samuel Beckett. He was walking with a friend who said, “Great day! Makes you glad to be alive!” And Beckett rolled his eyes and said, “I wouldn’t go THAT far.” The narrator recalls various suicide pacts. Two strangers meet on the Internet and book separate hotel rooms; later, they are found at the bottom of a lake, their wrists cuffed together. The formidable writer Kleist wanted to end his life in company, so he found a woman with a malignant tumor. They decided their deaths would be an orgasmic experience. Kleist shot the woman, then turned the gun on himself. The most popular suicide site in the world is a forest at the base of Mt. Fuji. The second-most-popular is the Golden Gate Bridge. Deterrence is attempted: Signs say, “Think of your parents!” and, “You can walk away from this!” (He who hesitates is not lost.) Is it true that suicide “survivors” tend to say they regretted their decision the instant they jumped? Nunez cites some study that suggests this is true in the case of suicide-because-of-broken-heart, and *not* true in the case of suicide-because-of-financial-ruin.
As you’re reading this wacky, bleak material, you’re thinking, who IS this delightful lunatic, doing all this sui generis thinking? And the effect is surprising: Despite the heavy subject matter, you may find your sense of wonder in life reawakened. O Brave New World! This loony planet we inhabit!
The book has a startling shift toward the end. Throughout, the narrator has been careful not to talk too much about her feelings for her dead friend. But she gives us a kind of dazzling climax: She confesses, “I’ve been wondering how to end this story.” And then she delivers a shocking bit of alternate-reality fiction: She has a chapter where the friend is in fact alive, and it emerges that his *almost* suicide has prompted the narrator to construct a story imagining what it would be like to have him dead. (Echoes of Lorrie Moore, “Anagrams,” here.) There’s a lively, emotional discussion--fully, deeply imagined--between the two characters. And then, again, Nunez pulls the rug out from under you. The scenario is just a fictional scenario. The friend is, indeed, dead. It’s hard to overstate the emotional impact of this literary strategy. Indirectly, the narrator has just confessed how much she misses her old buddy. She is so distraught, she has brought the man back to life, if only on the page, and if only for a few moments.
The story concludes with the one and only journey described throughout the novel. The Great Dane is so old and infirm and smelly, he needs to go to the beach. He needs to be at a beach house, where he can take three shaky steps and be on the sand, where his terrible smells can waft up into the air. The narrator considers when it will be time to kill this dog: She won’t say “put to sleep.” She reflects on the dog’s diminished sniffing capacities. She hears a sea gull cry out in pain, and wonders what caused the pain; it’s clear she’s identifying with the sea gull, if only subconsciously. She thinks again of the dead writer: “I want to call out your name, but the word is stuck in my throat. Oh, my friend! My friend!” And the story is finished.
I continue to think about this book, because it’s so daring. It doesn’t have a conventional arc. It’s not as if the narrator discovers a purpose in the final moments. She is ambivalent at the start, and she is ambivalent at the finish. But you do feel as if you have traveled somewhere--with her. You have watched her move from discomfort around the dog--to intense love for the dog. It’s a story of passion, even though there’s mainly one human character. It feels unusually honest. It made me think more about my own dog, and, again, despite its pitch-black truthfulness, it made me newly grateful to be alive. (Grateful--however briefly! Then I turned grumpy again. And the tides kept changing, and changing, as they tend to do, in this life.) I loved the book and read it twice. Consider the option!
P.S. I will be away for Spring Break--finally!--the next two weeks. Blog will resume in early April. Stay warm!
Basically, this is a very funny, very sad novel about a woman lazily wondering whether she should end her own life. That’s never explicitly spelled out. But her close friend--an esteemed writer, whom she may have loved--has just offed himself. The woman--who seems to be a proxy for Sigrid Nunez (but is she, really?)--has few strong attachments in the social realm. Her love life seems not to exist. (She has some interesting thoughts about the habits of a flaneur. A male writer speculates that you can’t be a female flaneur, because if you’re female, you’re subject to cat-calls, and you can’t slip into the pleasant state of total abstraction that flaneur-life calls for. But Nunez says: You’re subject to cat-calls only when you are young. To be an older woman in America, in 2018, she suggests, is to be invisible.)
Anyway, the narrator’s friend dies, and he leaves his Great Dane to her. She doesn’t want the Great Dane--Apollo. She never asked for Apollo. She doesn’t have room for him. But no one else will take him. And he is traumatized; he was abandoned even before the great writer found him, and now of course he has been abandoned again. What follows is a love story between the Great Dane and the narrator--and it’s genuinely moving, without getting sappy. The narrator cares for the dog, and eventually the dog cares for the narrator; he earns an “emotional support animal” designation, and though it’s mainly a way of getting around a finger-wagging landlord, it’s also an accurate label.
While the narrator cares for the dog, and removes herself from social life, she thinks a great deal. She thinks about self-destruction. She says many people feel life would be unbearable without the option of suicide. She recalls a story about Samuel Beckett. He was walking with a friend who said, “Great day! Makes you glad to be alive!” And Beckett rolled his eyes and said, “I wouldn’t go THAT far.” The narrator recalls various suicide pacts. Two strangers meet on the Internet and book separate hotel rooms; later, they are found at the bottom of a lake, their wrists cuffed together. The formidable writer Kleist wanted to end his life in company, so he found a woman with a malignant tumor. They decided their deaths would be an orgasmic experience. Kleist shot the woman, then turned the gun on himself. The most popular suicide site in the world is a forest at the base of Mt. Fuji. The second-most-popular is the Golden Gate Bridge. Deterrence is attempted: Signs say, “Think of your parents!” and, “You can walk away from this!” (He who hesitates is not lost.) Is it true that suicide “survivors” tend to say they regretted their decision the instant they jumped? Nunez cites some study that suggests this is true in the case of suicide-because-of-broken-heart, and *not* true in the case of suicide-because-of-financial-ruin.
As you’re reading this wacky, bleak material, you’re thinking, who IS this delightful lunatic, doing all this sui generis thinking? And the effect is surprising: Despite the heavy subject matter, you may find your sense of wonder in life reawakened. O Brave New World! This loony planet we inhabit!
The book has a startling shift toward the end. Throughout, the narrator has been careful not to talk too much about her feelings for her dead friend. But she gives us a kind of dazzling climax: She confesses, “I’ve been wondering how to end this story.” And then she delivers a shocking bit of alternate-reality fiction: She has a chapter where the friend is in fact alive, and it emerges that his *almost* suicide has prompted the narrator to construct a story imagining what it would be like to have him dead. (Echoes of Lorrie Moore, “Anagrams,” here.) There’s a lively, emotional discussion--fully, deeply imagined--between the two characters. And then, again, Nunez pulls the rug out from under you. The scenario is just a fictional scenario. The friend is, indeed, dead. It’s hard to overstate the emotional impact of this literary strategy. Indirectly, the narrator has just confessed how much she misses her old buddy. She is so distraught, she has brought the man back to life, if only on the page, and if only for a few moments.
The story concludes with the one and only journey described throughout the novel. The Great Dane is so old and infirm and smelly, he needs to go to the beach. He needs to be at a beach house, where he can take three shaky steps and be on the sand, where his terrible smells can waft up into the air. The narrator considers when it will be time to kill this dog: She won’t say “put to sleep.” She reflects on the dog’s diminished sniffing capacities. She hears a sea gull cry out in pain, and wonders what caused the pain; it’s clear she’s identifying with the sea gull, if only subconsciously. She thinks again of the dead writer: “I want to call out your name, but the word is stuck in my throat. Oh, my friend! My friend!” And the story is finished.
I continue to think about this book, because it’s so daring. It doesn’t have a conventional arc. It’s not as if the narrator discovers a purpose in the final moments. She is ambivalent at the start, and she is ambivalent at the finish. But you do feel as if you have traveled somewhere--with her. You have watched her move from discomfort around the dog--to intense love for the dog. It’s a story of passion, even though there’s mainly one human character. It feels unusually honest. It made me think more about my own dog, and, again, despite its pitch-black truthfulness, it made me newly grateful to be alive. (Grateful--however briefly! Then I turned grumpy again. And the tides kept changing, and changing, as they tend to do, in this life.) I loved the book and read it twice. Consider the option!
P.S. I will be away for Spring Break--finally!--the next two weeks. Blog will resume in early April. Stay warm!
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