These include, among others, suicide and its aftermath platonic friendship, sexual relationships and marriage grief and bereavement academic life creative writing, writing as a profession and literature dogs as companions and dogs in literature. This, however, is a thin premise for a plot most of the novel reads like a series of essays (the book is comprised of 12 parts) that focus on recurring themes.

That sense of jeopardy is what holds the entire narrative together - will she keep the dog and be turfed out into the street, or will she find a way to get rid of him? Recurring themes There is a very real possibility that she will lose her much loved rent-controlled apartment if she does not find another home for Apollo. She begins to fall in love with him.īut his presence in the building is forbidden by her landlord who has banned pets. And yet, for all the inconvenience and stress of living together in such a confined space, the pair of them get along well. The dog, Apollo, is beautiful, docile and loyal, but he’s huge and he takes up so much room in her Manhattan apartment he has to sleep on her bed. Despite their close friendship for more than 30 years, the idea that the woman would look after his dog if he died has never been discussed: she finds out the (not particularly welcome) news when his third wife invites her for a coffee. The inheritance, like his death (a suicide), is unexpected. The Friend is about an unnamed middle-aged woman who inherits a dog after her best friend, a male creative writing professor, dies and leaves his great Dane to her. I know it pre-dated What Are You Going Through, but it felt very much like a companion piece to that novel - and maybe that’s why it didn’t really work for me: I simply read them too close together.

But its rambling nature, its lack of plot and structure, tested my patience at a time when I had little patience to test. She was a new discovery for me back in January, when I fell in love with her wonderful novel The Last of her Kind, but I’m fairly certain that if I had read The Friend first I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading anything else by her.

This is the third book by Sigrid Nunez that I have read this year. Fiction – Kindle edition Virago 224 pages 2019.

The friend by nunez