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Winner of the National Book Award

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains.

The doctors who examined the women--about a hundred and fifty in all--found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth--and there were some who doubted this, who thought that the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability--the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness.

In other words, the women's minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.



It seems rare, to me, that a really great novel wins the National Book Award. A novel that is bold and original and exciting, and not simply an attempt to push various topical buttons. "The Friend" is an ecstatic work of art. It's bizarre and moving. No one else could have written it but its author. And it won! It just won the National Book Award!

One of my favorite writers, Peter Cameron, was commenting on Sigrid Nunez, and on "The Friend," on his blog, Extreme Legibility. He implied that "The Friend" was a great leap forward for Nunez. He said something like this: I think the reason it seems so free and vivid is that Nunez finally gave herself permission to write whatever the hell she wanted. She now makes no concessions to conventional taste. It's as if she made a list of the things that really fascinate her, and then she worked them into a novel.

One thing people who respond to my blog sometimes say is: I like the memoir pieces. The book pieces and the movie pieces, they just make me wish I knew what you were talking about.

I get that, but I have to write about books and movies, because often they're the things that the voice in my head is prattling on about. I think, if I attempted something book-length, it would have bits on being a gay man, and on being a teacher, and on being the owner of a dog, but it would also have bits on serial killers and Broadway divas and female writers from pre-WWII Britain. Because those are my obsessions. Barbara Pym would rub right up against an essay about a failed lesson plan.

It seems to me Sigrid Nunez has managed to get away with the thing we all want to get away with: Designing some kind of ship that would accommodate every strange thing she thinks about. A ship that could hold all that weight, and still seem sleek and attractive. That's "The Friend."

A particularly dazzling feature in this novel: Nunez builds a writer's self-doubt into the narration. Anyone who picks up a pen now is obviously thinking about how few readers remain in the world, and how screens have taken over people's minds, and how social behavior is now so loose as to render impossible a great nineteenth-century-ish tale about adultery or forbidden love. You have that loud chorus of doubters in your head every time you start to type. And, boldly, Nunez has built the chorus right into her book: She says, the possible irrelevance of my book is *also* something that terrifies and tantalizes me, so I'm just going to go ahead and talk about that, too. Why not? (She also underlines the smallness and irrelevance of her own experience, when compared to the experiences of some of her students, who have been prostitutes, slaves, victims of physical abuse. How many writers would be bold enough to do this?)

Another Give No Fucks moment of greatness: Nunez is clearly stunned and intrigued by Suicide as a Thing in the World. This is something that thrills and disturbs all of us--come on, be honest--but we often don't talk about it, because it's Not Nice. Nunez makes suicide the inciting event in her story, and she doesn't present it with heavy-handed somberness or a homily. She writes like a friendly alien, with an almost clinical detachment, at times: The taking of one's own life is another phenomenon one can observe on this particular planet.

Nunez gives herself permission to tell the story of Kliest, a famous writer who wanted to End it All early. Kliest found a young woman dying of cancer. And the two formed a cheerful suicide pact. They spent a night together--I think--then offed themselves in a park. Murder-suicide. Suicide-suicide? Hard to put a conclusive label on this odd behavior. Nunez speaks, as well, about the beloved and prolific novelist Simenon, whose daughter formed a world of filial obsession. Obsession and maybe erotic love. Simenon's daughter could think about nothing BUT Simenon and then--you guessed it--she offed herself. What does any of this have to do with a story about a woman who adopts a Great Dane (which is ostensibly the story of "The Friend"?) We're simply encountering subjects that engage Nunez fully--subjects that make her sing--and since they're gripping to the writer, they're gripping to us.

Do you know what I think of when I read "The Friend"? It's Idina Menzel. Bear with me. Menzel sometimes seems joyless and constricted to me. She gets nervous, and her voice suffers. But there's a recording where she's at the White House. She sings "What I Did for Love," for Obama. For whatever reason, there, she seems entirely free. She seems not to be second-guessing herself; she's really there, on-stage, body and soul, and she seems to soar. She has stepped out of her own way. That's also what Nunez does--for herself, and for her reader--in "The Friend."

Have I persuaded you to take out your credit card? I hope so. When I finished "The Friend," I read it again. And now I plan to read it a third time. Happy exploring!

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