The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

(Riverhead, 2018)

 

Sigrid had told me a year or so ago that she was working on a novel about a woman who inherits a Great Dane after the dog's owner, a friend of the woman's, dies.  This sounded like a promising premise for a novel, so I felt predisposed to like the book, but I was surprised by how much Sigrid does with this simple premise and how rich and rewarding this book is.

The narrator is an independent woman who lives alone, a writer, an intellectual, a professor.  The friend whose dog she inherits is also a writer and teacher -- in fact he was the narrator's teacher and mentor early in his career, but the narrator, unlike many of her fellow female students, did not have an affair or marriage with the man.  Instead they shared a long and close friendship.

She is surprised, however, when he commits suicide, perhaps because of writer's block, and his third wife tells her it was his wish that she would adopt his dog, Apollo, a Great Dane that he had found abandoned in Central Park.  Although the narrator has no experience of owning dogs (she is a self-avowed cat person) and lives in a rent-controlled apartment that forbids them, she agrees to take the dog, and of course bonds with it in a very real and touching way.

The story of the narrator's and Apollo's courtship and romance is constantly interrupted by observations and explorations of many diverse topics (dogs in literature, the relation between men and women and sexual harassment, competition in the literary world, life in New York City).  By including so much material that is not fictionalized and reads like essays, Sigrid gives this novel a very original and pleasing texture.  At times the writing and tone made me think of several other writers: Susan Sontag (interesting, given Sigrid's relationship with her -- see Sempre Susan), David Markson, Lily Tuck, Lydia Davis.  There is something very cool and bracing about the tone of the book that completely prevents the dog story from becoming sentimental: it's a very winning combination of subjects and tones, and makes the book seem very fresh and refreshing.

It felt to me as if in some way Sigrid had found her true voice in this book -- or perhaps it is only the matter of her doing in this book what she is so adept and skilled at doing, and not trying to do anything that is usually expected from a novel.  A smart and beautiful book.