100 Words: THE FRIEND (2018), by Sigrid Nunez

More bitter than sweet, more than a hint of the reality hunger characterizing other recent forays (Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy) into the meta-literary: novels about novels, novels about what novels have become in the age of their diminishing clout, a diminishment tuned to diminished whiteness and maleness, a canny examination of what is left to fiction of authenticity in the form of Apollo, the Apollonian Great Dane at the heart of Nunez’s darkly funny negotiation of the razor’s edge between cynicism and sentimentality. Pull down thy vanity, dear dead author, and take your dog for a walk.