Sigrid Nunez's Nat'l Book Award Winner '18 THE FRIEND is a Novel Reader's Best Friend I LOVED IT!

THE FRIEND which took home the bone for this year's Nat'l Book Award is about the relationship between a woman & her best friend, her dog Apollo.  This ingenious & captivating novel by Sigrid Nunez (b US 1951) is about so much more than a friendship between a human being and a dog.  This friendship between an unnamed narrator and her inherited Great Dane she names Apollo, surpasses what constitutes friendship.  The female narrator is grieving over the recent suicide of her dearest male companion.  Both are writers and each other's intellectual soulmate & confidant.  Her psychiatrist tells her she is mourning as a lover or wife would.  But she never suspected her friend was contemplating taking his own life.  After the funeral, wife #3 (the man was an ignominious womanizer) asks if the woman would take ownership of the Great Dane whom her departed husband found abandoned and adopted.  Despite protestations that her building wouldn't permit her to have a dog (which are true) and the fact that she's always been lifelong cat person, she agrees to take ownership of the dog.  Perhaps her decision is made out of loneliness or a means to stay connected to  her closest friend.  As her grief and depression escalate her feelings for Apollo become profound.  "I sing with joy at the thought of seeing him and for sure this love is not like any love I've ever felt." We feel sympathy for the narrator whose aware her most significant relationship is with a dog.   The narrator maintains a perpetual dialogue with her deceased companion.  She ruminates with him over their past lives, literature and the demise of nobility in being a writer and the vast apathy for reading. She thinks writers are elitist, egotistic and privileged snobs.  She incessantly drops literary icons like  Woolf, Chekov, Proust, Rilke  and their views.  Particularly she mentions Ackerly & his madness at the heart for his dog.  And Rilke's view on love.  She asks Apollo what are "if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other."  The narrator makes astute observations on how she perceives others and how she perceives them accessing and Apollo.  She has a discerning eye and a hilarious self-deprecation.  Nunez's novel THE FRIEND is a melancholy & endearing treasure.  "What we miss-what we lose and what we mourn-isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are."