The Friend: A Novel

Friend or Unrequited Love?

I was a little put off in the beginning because the book wasn't living up to my preconceived notions of what kind of book it was going to be.
The main character loses a close friend to suicide. In the midst of her grief, she has the friend's big Great Dane foisted on her. She's more of a cat person, really, and the dog (Apollo) creates a whole host of problems for her. The book is written as a dialogue that's really a monologue that the main character is having with her dead friend, musing on the past and philosophizing about life. And dogs. Of course.

This is not a Dog Book. This is not a Book About Grief. This is just an Ode to Self-Importance. This was a book club pick, which means that, despite my desire to toss this into the DNF bin, I had to suffer through it. From the blurb on the back, I was expecting a quiet, moving story about loss and the healing bond between a woman and her dog. What I found instead was an introspective monologue that confuses self-absorption for depth and moral detachment for wisdom. Yes, Sigrid Nunez can write. Her command of language is undeniable. There are sentences that gleam, phrases that are so skillfully turned they almost convince you the content behind them must be meaningful. Unfortunately, the beauty of her prose cannot disguise the hollowness at the center. What should have been a moving meditation on friendship, mortality, and the bond between humans and animals is instead a self-centered intellectual monologue. The narrator spends far more time admiring her own thoughts about literature, art, and the supposed suffering of writers than she does connecting with the dog that supposedly anchors the story. The book’s treatment of writers as a uniquely persecuted class feels grotesquely tone-deaf. When the narrator suggests that the hardships of a writer’s life rival those of people who endure real violence and exploitation, the result is not profundity but moral blindness. Equally troubling is the handling of the deceased friend, a professor whose behavior toward his students would in any reasonable context be considered predatory. The narrator’s indulgent defense of him as a misunderstood genius or as a victim of changing times is deeply uncomfortable. It reads less like complexity and more like complicity. Finding excuses for a “rape-y” academic does not make one open-minded; it makes one an enabler of abuse dressed up as intellectual tolerance. Throughout the novel, Nunez gestures toward big ideas (loneliness, creativity, grief, love) but the emotional reality never arrives. The narrator is too absorbed in her own reflections to make room for genuine feeling or for the reader’s empathy. Even the dog, the supposed heart of the story, feels like an afterthought, a convenient symbol rather than a living presence. Readers who come hoping for an exploration of the human-animal bond will find very little of it here. There are flashes of brilliance, moments when the writing nearly achieves the depth it pretends to have. But they are rare and fleeting. What remains is a self-congratulatory work that mistakes self-reference for insight. The Friend isn’t a book about healing or compassion. It’s a book about how writers think about themselves, and how easily that self-regard can smother every other feeling.

Really beautiful novel about friendship, love, grief and identity Nunez does a wonderful job illustrating how our abilities to love and care for dogs—especially those who are resistant—can teach us so much about who we are and what we need. Loved the second person narration in this novel—reminded me of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

I personally wasn't a fan of the book, mostly because of the literary writing style and the scattered thoughts storyline process. I understand the book was processing grief, mourning the complex relationship between an age gap (perhaps predatory) friendship that was often projection or expressed through the dog but it just fell flat to me. This isn't a book I would suggest anyone to struggle through nor read.

Too much talk about suicide.