Or: “It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them.
“But from the time I started studying Buddhism I found it at odds with wanting to be a writer,” the narrator says. Nunez is a keen observer of behavior, and throughout the text she plants wonderful nuggets that immediately ring true yet still manage to be surprising. The joys of this novel lie in Nunez’s striking capacity to describe the world and its inhabitants, both human and animal.
Nunez deftly weaves together two tropes - the human-animal relationship saga (who rescues who?) and the grief story - and somehow makes them both fresh again. The plot is simple: A writer’s old friend, mentor and sometimes lover commits suicide, and she is compelled to adopt his huge, silent, slobbering Great Dane named Apollo. Sigrid Nunez’s new novel “The Friend” is a heart-wrenching yet bleakly funny rumination on friendship, love and grief.
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