True or False?

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Someone in a bookshop put Sigrid Nunez's 'The Friend' into my hand. "You wrote that memoir about falling apart and getting your dog, didn't you," the person said, "so trust me, you will love this." I like trusting people, especially when it comes to unexpected book recommendations, and so I did as I was told.

It was because of that introduction that I assumed I was reading a memoir. And my goodness, what a stunning memoir too. The narrator has been felled by the suicide of a very close friend and writing mentor. In the aftermath she somehow finds herself having to take charge of the dead friend's dog; this is not just any old dog but a HUGE and very old one - a Great Dane, called Apollo. Quite apart from the inconvenience of the animal's size and the burden of commitment, the narrator lives in a New York appartment in which pets are forbidden, so there is also the strong possibility her charity towards the pet will lead to her being kicked out of her own home.

The tone of the narrator is deeply sad, but full of compelling insights as she tries to make sense of why her friend, a university lecturer, might have taken his own life. As a writer herself, she also infuses her meditations with wonderful quotes and observations from famous thinkers and other writers - all of them so fascinating and spot-on, that I kept having to pause to jot them all down, in the little notebook I reserve for such pearls. The dog, Apollo is also utterly compelling, not just for his beautiful vastness and the threat of eviction that his existence poses, but because he is, if anything, even more depressed than his new owner. He has lost the person he loved most in the world, and, with that beguiling innocence of animals, can make no secret of it. So there is no quick cheesy bonding between these two protagonists; no quick anything. Nunez is masterful as she takes us through all this, as dry and funny as she is moving; while every word resonates with truth...

It was only towards the end of the book, thanks to a scene in which the narrator 'speaks' to her dead friend telling him how she is going to play around with all the facts of his life, including the size of the dog(!), that it dawned on me I was actually reading a work of fiction. I could not have been more astonished, or more delighted to have been taken in. (Reading the blurb would have set me right much earlier, but I tend to avoid blurbs for fear of preconceptions and plot spoilers.) As a memoir this novel rang so true! Indeed, if my own 'real' memoir has made any reader feel an echo of what Nunez stirred in me, then I would be happy.

So please, trust me, as I trusted the stranger, when I tell you this is a wonderful book. It is beautifully written and contains exactly that punch of poignant reality one seeks from confessional writing. But it is also a work of fiction which cleverly and seamlessly addresses that most popular of reader-author questions: "Where do your ideas come from?" So. Did Sigrid Nunez once lose a friend to suicide? If so, was he an endearing philanderer as well as a prominent university lecturer? And did the man have a dog? Or has every detail of the novel been plucked from the rich seam of Sigrid Nunez's writerly imagination? I think it is good not know; good simply to let the story stand, as every story should, solid and rooted in its own merit.



View all my reviews