Our book group meets on the last Wednesday of the month at 1pm. This month’s title is “The Friend” by Sigrid Nunez.
It is said that grief is the price we pay for love. In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, grief is embodied in a novel form—a Great Dane dog.
Sigrid Nunez’s new novel tackles an uncomfortable topic—grief. It shouldn’t be uncomfortable, right? We all experience it at one time or another. Yet many of us are uncomfortable with it—the weight of it, the magnitude of it, the lingering of it long after the loved one has gone. We often feel that grief is repellant—as though others can smell it on us and it makes them uncomfortable, too.
If grief could take form as a living thing, what would it be? In The Friend, grief is represented by Apollo, an aloof, slobbering, lumbering Great Dane, a beloved pet left behind by his deceased owner. The unnamed narrator inherits the animal after her friend (referred to throughout the book as “you”) dies by suicide and leaves his Great Dane without a home. As the narrator struggles to ease the dog’s anxiety without his owner while simultaneously acclimating to becoming a pet owner herself, she slowly starts to heal from the loss of her friend.
The representation of grief as a giant Great Dane makes sense in the context of the book. The narrator’s dead friend was a larger-than-life literary personality with an extensive publishing history and checkered romantic past. The narrator sees her friend as both hero and mentor, as well as a flawed man unable to deal with the challenges of change: aging, literary tastes, the ebbs and flow of creativity. This oscillation between clear and rosy lenses is not unlike the way we might bounce between realistic and idealized versions of a person after they’re dead.
Nunez devotes a considerable amount of time in the book reflecting on the craft of writing. Both the narrator and the deceased are writers and their art plays an important role in their lives. The act of writing in The Friend could be understood as a metaphor for living authentically—writing the book only you can write, weathering the storms of critiques and staying true to oneself. This theme is expressed through the behaviors of both the dead friend and the narrator: It is suspected that the deceased lost his creative urge before committing his act; the narrator finds it difficult to write while she navigating the unknown territories of grief.
