Recent Reading: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

I just finished reading Sigrid Nunez book The Friend.

Here is how NPR described the book:

Grief, it turns out, is more domain than emotion: A new manner of thinking that subsumes you after trauma. Sadness – zoom out – thinking about sadness – zoom out – thinking about how best to be sad. And to read The Friend is to be awash in the sharp particularities of one person’s grief – a faucet of literary references that buoy and drown a writer in equal parts after her close friend’s suicide. And, thanks to the Great Dane that graces the book’s Technicolor jacket, Sigrid Nunez’s novel makes the persuasive case that grief – fully opaque – can’t be understood, but it can be accepted.

I loved many things about The Friend. Here is one passage I marked when I was reading:

Across from the office I share with O.P. is the office of this year’s Distinguished Visiting Writer, but he is never there. He does not hold office hours and has instructed the program secretary to forward mail to his home rather than use his school mail slot. When he comes in to teach he goes straight to his workshop classroom. Few of his colleagues ever cross paths with him, and when they do he looks right through the person as if they’re not there. Before the semester began he instructed the chair to inform faculty that he does not do book blurbs. He himself informed students on the first day of class: I don’t do letters of recommendation. Don’t even ask. 

When you heard this, you were indignant: I should’ve told him that back when he asked me to write him a letter for the Guggenheim. 

The book is not plot-driven, at least in my reading. The book is a long series of interior monologues. This way of organizing the book reminded me of some Saul Bellow's books, especially Herzog and Humboldt's Gift. Often, while reading, I felt like I was in the middle of a stimulating conversation with an articulate and well-read friend.

I think I would have not liked this book as much as I did if I was twenty years younger. When reading The Friend, I came across references to Svetlana Alexievich, and Karl Ove Knausgard and had read and remembered their work. I probably have not recognized those names if I were much younger.

I highly recommend this book.