Grief takes many forms. Sometimes it’s a 180-pound Great Dane wedged into a tiny New York apartment where dogs are not allowed.
In Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend—which won the National Book Award, and is newly out in paperback—a tiny woman loses her friend to suicide, and unexpectedly ends up with his monstrous Dane, Apollo. She’s always been more of a cat person.
She is proud of herself for the glimmers of ingenuity that Apollo requires, including her use of a pail and sand shovel to handle the Dane’s bulky bowel movements on the sidewalks of Manhattan. But mostly she is lost in what the past might mean for the future.
She thinks about her friend’s three wives, and about their own meeting—she a student, he a professor.
She thinks about her own students, and whether fiction writing can withstand the present moment, whether it can change anything—her students can’t seem to process stories that don’t line up with the views they already have.
How impossible it seems now, she thinks, “to imagine anything like what led Abraham Lincoln to say, meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862, So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Meanwhile, Apollo waits. PLEASE READ
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, from Riverhead
