The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beautiful, lucid, and candid in its examination of a friend’s suicide. Nunez adopts the disarming format of a letter to her protagonist’s recently dead friend, following the thread of her thoughts in a way that reminded me of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (though with a bit more grounding than Sebald). I found the digressions (whether into the state of teaching, her friend’s love life, an affection for dogs, the writing life) fascinating and refreshing. Is it that grief lances the sugarcoating so often added to these subjects? I don’t know. But there’s no cynicism here either. For all of its bleak subject matter (suicide is a running thread) The Friend feels full of life, even in the midst of struggle, bewilderment, and loss.
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