Despite weighing in at little more than 200 pages, Sigrid Nunez's new novel sure is heavy.

Brilliant but informal, sad yet laugh-out-loud funny, The Friend is a digressive bumblebee of a novel that alights on aging, death, the waning power of literature and the strength of friendship. It's a book of fragments that questions what it means to be human.

When a middle-aged New York City writing professor—unnamed, as are all human characters in the book—loses her longtime mentor and friend to suicide, she floats through her days in a bubble of stunned grief. Then her friend's latest wife—now widow—known as "number three," asks the narrator to take Apollo, her husband's massive, aged Great Dane.

Even though her apartment building does not allow dogs (and it would be impossible to hide one that's large enough for children to ride on), she agrees. Apollo is also grieving, spending his days waiting forlornly at the door and his nights howling out his anguish. Slowly, their uneasy coexistence becomes an intense, exclusive partnership that alarms the narrator's friends. "Oh," says a woman she meets at a party, "you're the one who's in love with a dog." Her friends worry she will be homeless—booted from her rent-controlled apartment, a very real possibility the narrator ignores. But woman and dog have an inner journey to make, swimming upstream against their grief and puzzlement in an attempt to understand why their friend abandoned them.

Nunez's seventh novel is small yet rich. Replete with limpid asides on writing, writers and what it means to be a person of words in an increasingly emoji world, The Friend will appeal in particular to fans of postmodern authors such as David Markson. Talented as she is, Nunez should be better known among readers. If you're already a fan, this beautiful, spare work will not disappoint. If you aren't, this relevant novel is the perfect introduction.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This is very much a writer's novel. The unnamed narrator is an author who teaches composition, as is the eponymous friend. They met in a college writing class—she a student, he the professor—and he went on to marry another student from the same class. This would be one of his three wives, only referred to as "wife one," "wife two," and "wife three." Wife three was married to the friend when he committed suicide unexpectedly, leaving behind a Great Dane he'd recently adopted. The narrator takes the dog reluctantly and begins a journey of self-discovery. In the hands of many authors, a premise like this would be corny, but Nunez (Salvation City; The Last of Her Kind) has a subtle, ironic tone that makes it work. Was she in love with her friend? Was he a terrible person, or is the narrator exaggerating because he has died? These answers aren't important, and not much happens in terms of plot. Instead, this is a slow, poignant meditation on grief, rife with pithy literary myths and quotations. VERDICT Literature nerds, creative writing students, and dog lovers will find this work delightful. Recommended for literary fiction collections.—Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA

In the riveting new novel from Nunez (Salvation City), the unnamed narrator thinks in the second person, addressing an unnamed old friend, a man, who has recently and unexpectedly committed suicide. The two first met decades earlier, while she was his student, the same semester in fact, when a fellow student became "Wife One" of three. While wives and lovers have come and gone, the narrator has remained a constant, friendly intimate of the deceased, a platonic yet intense and complex relationship. Mourning, she begins writing a cathartic elegy that becomes a larger meditation on writing, loss, and various forms of love. Early in the book, Wife Three calls to ask if the narrator will take responsibility for a large Great Dane named Apollo, whom the man had found abandoned in Central Park. Despite the unexpectedness of the request, the narrator takes the dog home, and over the course of the rest of the novel, her love for Apollo both consumes and heals her. This elegant novel explores both rich memories and day-to-day mundanity, reflecting the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present. (Feb.)