My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Friend: A Novel (Rating 4) – A Grieving Woman’s Best Friend. In The Friend: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez, a woman writer, grieving the suicide of her friend and mentor, adopts his dog. The Great Dane is named Apollo, the multifaceted Greek god of archery, music and dance, poetry, truth and prophecy, healing and diseases, the Sun and light, and the epitome of beauty. Slightly imperfect, but still stunning, the beast is the book’s only named character. He is a stand-in for the man, prompting the question: If dog is man’s best friend, and the man was the woman’s best friend, can the dog becomes the woman’s best friend? The suicide comes as a shock to her. The dog, old and ailing, will soon die too. The difference is that the woman has time to prepare herself for the dog’s death. Some say authors write fiction in order to rewrite history, their own or society’s. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I find this motivation limiting; it chains imagination to the past. But in the novel, the woman does attempt to edit her relationship with the absent man through her connection with his dog. Given that her aim is to come to terms with her grief, she is only partially successful. She skirts around it. Avoidance is fine for a character, but I wish Nunez herself had been less reluctant to plumb how inexplicable grief writes on us with indelible ink.
