The Friend

Winner of the National Book Award, Signd Nuzez's The Friend is a meditation on grief. An unnamed narrator's longtime friend has just committed suicide."Another time you said that, for a person who had reached a certain age, it could be a rational decision, a perfectly sound choice, a solution even. Unlike when a young person commits suicide, which could never be anything but a mistake. Once, you cracked us up with the line I think I’d prefer a novella of a life."

The woman ends up with the man's dog, a 180-pound great Dane, and at first it is a struggle, as she considers herself a cat person and dogs aren't allowed in her building. But as time goes by she falls in love with the dog, perhaps because he reminds her of her departed friend, but also because he's a dog.

The book is written in the first person as though the woman were talking to her dead friend (no one has names in this book, except the dog, Apollo). She has to come to terms with the grief she feels, and then has to confront whether she was in love with this man (he had three wives, and was a that old cliche, the womanizing college professor: "I don’t like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.").

Death, particularly suicide, runs through the book. She mentions many people, and then off-handedly remarks that they killed themselves (one of them is a friend and correspondent of Flannery O'Connor). She frequently mentions Virginia Woolf. She tells the story of being asked by NPR to prepare a segment recommending one of her favorite books. She chooses The Oxford Book of Death, and never hears back from them.

And as so many books are about, it's about writing. If you read enough literature you'll feel like you were a real creative writing professor. There are a lot of shots against modern students, who refuse to take at face value the geniuses they're being asked to read (but is this new? And won't most of them end up teaching writing and complaining about their own students?). The narrator also has little patience with the faults of today's students: "At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don’t put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as “pieces”?"

The narrator mentions Susan Sontag's "Illness as a Metaphor," and hear the dog is the metaphor. He enjoys when she reads to her, and eventually, after a chapter that makes us doubt everything we've read before, the book will be in the form of a letter to him. Because a dog asks for so little, but gives so much in return, and does not judge.

It was great reading about a person who comes to love a dog, no matter what the reason. The Friend is a very moving book, and any one who was an English major will find much to nod their head or laugh at. I particularly liked this line: "Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again."