The Friend

I struggled reading The Friend, not just because it is a novel framed by suicide and loss, but because it is a novel so focused on how writing and reading frame our capacity to cope with grief, and with the tumult of the world around us. There is a beauty to the way Ms. Nunez speaks of various kinds of “friendships” here—with mentors, with colleagues, with students, with the ex-wives of ex-lovers, with the titular friend, the dog Apollo—but there is also an incisive questioning about the nature of life, and its worth in living. This can be discomfiting if you are grappling with those questions yourself; this rumination on friends and grief and life itself is much heavier than its story, and its short length, will indicated.