The Friend is a one-sided conversation between Me and You. Me is a woman, perhaps in her 50s, who is a writer and also teaches writing to university students. The conversation is necessarily one-sided because You is deceased—a recent suicide. You was also a writer, male, a bit older and considerably more successful than Me. Me and You have been close friends for decades—she was his protégé, his soulmate, and, for exactly one night near the beginning of their relationship, his lover. You was married three times; his wives are identified as Wife One, Wife Two, and Wife Three.
We often organize our thoughts, explain ourselves to ourselves, by addressing them to an absent person; this kind of apostrophizing is almost inevitable when that person will be absent forever (https://literarydevices.net/apostrophe/). As Me recalls You, and addresses him, she draws on a lifetime of reading and learning that would have flavored real-life conversations between the two:
The intensity of your romantic life was not merely helpful but essential to your work, you said. Balzac lamenting after a night of passion that he’d just lost a book, Flaubert’s insistence that orgasm was a drain on a man’s creative juices—that to choose the work over the life meant as much sexual abstinence as a man could endure—these were interesting stories but, at bottom, silliness. If such fears were grounded, monks would be the most creative people on earth, you said. And after all, plenty of great writers were also great womanizers, or at least known to have potent sex drives. You write for two people said Hemingway, you said. First for yourself, then for the woman you love. You yourself never wrote better than during those periods when you were having lots of good sex, you said. With you, the beginning of an affair often coincided with a spell of productivity. It was one of your excuses for cheating. I was blocked and I had a deadline, you once told me. Not even half joking.
I’ve so far failed to mention The Friend’s other major character, the one pictured on the front cover. This would be Apollo, the 150-pound Great Dane that Me has inherited from You. Over lunch with Me, Wife Three has confided that You, before taking his life, has suggested that Me and Apollo might make a good match:
“I begged him to find someone else to take him, which is when your name came up.” [This is Wife Three speaking.]
“It did?”
“Yes.”
“But he never said anything to me.”
“That’s because he really wanted to keep the dog. And in the end he wore me down. But your name came up a few times. She lives alone, doesn’t have a partner or any kids or pets, she mostly works at home, and she loves animals—that’s what he said.”
“He said that?”
“I wouldn’t make it up.”
Me is more than a bit unworldly, a gentle soul and not prone to challenging things that people tell her, which may explain why she never seems to consider the obvious—that Wife Three did in fact “make it up.” We infer that Me’s devotion to You must have been an open secret in their circle.
Me is a soulful, warm, intelligent, and interesting person, and the pleasure of reading The Friend is sharing her company for a few hours. But that doesn’t mean that Nunez might not be having a bit of fun at Me’s expense. Consider, for example, how Me relates to us how Apollo begins to become solicitous of her:
One night I wake to find Apollo by the bed, apparently trying with his teeth to draw back over me the blanket I must have thrown off in my sleep. When I tell people about this they don’t believe it. They say I must have dreamed it. Which I agree is possible. But really I’m thinking they’re just jealous.
She also tells us that Apollo, in his unspeaking way, insists that she read aloud to him in the evening. It’s perfectly valid for us to take these assertions at face value. But it’s also valid to assume that she’s a bit credulous. For the most part, The Friend is a serious, even solemn work that deals with grief. It’s an emotional book, with the emotion expressed for the most part through musings and memories. I don’t think the grace and beauty of the book is at all diminished if our narrator is also on occasion revealed to be a bit soft headed. So yeah, I think Wife Three did make up the story about You wanting Me to have the dog.
Me is a writer and so her memories of You, and her account of living with Apollo, are intermingled with her thoughts on various writers and ideas. In The Friend she muses about J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace, about a 2014 Hungarian film titled White God (“in which the dogs of Budapest rise up against the oppressor”), and about Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet from 1929, among various other things. The short descriptions of these works are interesting in and of themselves, but they also give us insight into Me’s mind and also comment in indirect ways on what’s happening in The Friend. Disgrace, for example, tells of the disastrous results of the affair a middle-aged literature teacher forces upon a young student. You was also a womanizer, though he did not meet a similar fate. Me never criticized him, but her recollections of Disgrace at least acknowledge that she might have had reservations about his behavior, as per the first quote from the book above.
Me has also been working with victims of sexual trafficking, helping them work out their trauma through writing. Me is not herself such a victim, but she wonders on some level if You has not taken advantage of her in different ways throughout their relationship, and if she is not in her own way dealing with a kind of trauma as a result, even as she mourns and misses You.
Nunez blends all of these ingredients—mourning, friendship, human/animal relationships, teaching, writing, abuse—in interesting and strange ways. Thoughts bounce between these various themes, and asides and random thoughts pop out of the text every now and then that refract them in unexpected ways. For example:
I have heard of a study according to which cats, unlike many other animal species, do not forgive. (Like writers, perhaps, who, according to an editor I know, never forget a slight.)
Most of us are to some extent victims of those more assertive and articulate than us, women no doubt more often than men. The Friend shows us how one particularly vulnerable individual copes with this kind of asymmetrical relationship with her friends and with the world: on the one hand by having such a rich inner life, and on the other by forming an intimate bond with a fellow creature that will never try to use words to control her.
