The Friend
A writer mourns her mentor and inherits his enormous Great Dane. Nunez's slim, essayistic novel about grief, writing, and living with an animal became an unlikely hit, winning the 2018 National Book Award. It works because it refuses sentimentality at every turn while being genuinely, quietly devastating about loss.
The cover promises a woman and her dog, and readers who buy that promise feel bait and switched once the book turns out to be mostly about a dead mentor and literary status. That mentor was a serial philanderer whom the narrator keeps excusing, and the softening reads to some as “extremely pretentious and mean-spirited,” all “pontificating and justifying her friend's repeated adultering.” Dog readers get shortchanged: one puts it bluntly, “All I want to hear is about Apollo.” A passage on the hardship of being a writer draws the harshest line, one reader mocking it as if it were harder “to be a writer than a sex traffic victim.” Audiobook listeners pile on too, calling the narration flat and the short sections repetitive, especially once the quoting and requoting of other writers sets in.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
