The Height of her Powers

The Friend a novel by Sigrid Nunez.  Riverhead Books.  224 pp.  $10.39.

I don’t know how Sigrid Nunez does it.  She seems to begin her novels any old place, with whatever event comes to mind, and moves on from there.  She doesn’t tell stories chronologically or in any particular way, but they fall right into place.  Every episode, however short—some are just a few lines—seems just right.  And when you reach the end—of books that are all rather brief—you feel completely satisfied.

Her two most recent books concern the most gruesome subjects imaginable, one about a friend who committed suicide, the other about a woman suffering from terminal cancer who is planning to take her own life.  And though Nunez doesn’t avoid the sadness of either situation—in the case of The Friend, a deep sadness for the narrator—the books aren’t downers; they have a light whimsical quality.  What Are You Going Through has a cat on the cover, this book a dog.  A Great Dane in fact.

The Friend won the National Book Award in 2018, so I imagine What Are You Going Through will not.  But it’s every bit as good a book, and just as touching.

It’s always a compliment to say this about an author, but her books have an undeniable autobiographical feel; we’re convinced they really happened.  Something that enhances that feeling is that none of the characters is named, including the narrator.  The woman who narrates The Friend teaches a college class in autobiographical fiction, Proust, Isherwood, Duras, Knausgaard.  That seems a telling detail.  And I’ve just begun Nunez’ first novel, which is transparently autobiographical, because it deals with her unusual background.

We’re in the realm of novels that read like memoirs.

The friend in this novel is a man our narrator met in grad school, slightly older, who was both a friend and mentor; he knew the ropes better than she.  They loved each other and could easily have been more than friends—they had sex, but just once—but it’s probably best that they weren’t, because he was a sexual predator who had three wives and any number of affairs, sometimes with students.  He was a writer who taught writing—as is the narrator—and apparently had a successful career, though it was thinning out toward the end.  He was apparently in his sixties when he took his life, and he left no note.  He was just suddenly gone.

Toward the end of his life he discovered a Great Dane in the park with no identifying collar and adopted the dog, to his current wife’s chagrin.  Now that he’s died she wonders what to do with the dog.  She thought of our narrator, who isn’t married and doesn’t have children.  But she has a tiny apartment, hardly suitable for a Great Dane, and pets are banned from her building.  She’s a cat person, not a dog person.  But in what seems a sign of how much she loved her departed friend, she takes the dog, in this hopeless situation.  And she comes to love him.  You could make a case that the dog is The Friend.

So we have essentially comic scenes of this mammoth dog taking over her life—immediately occupying the one bed in the apartment, eventually lying the length of it with her, almost as if he were human; taking walks around the city, during which she carries not plastic bags to clean up after him, but a child’s pail and shovel, because he drops such big loads; demanding that she read to him (it’s a long story)—alternating with her grief over, and attempts to understand, her departed friend.

Nunez is wonderful at naming the trials of old age (which I’m in the midst of myself,  slightly older than she).  In What Are Your Going Through she talks about the difficulties for women; here she talks about men, and in fact this particular man, a kind of person who is not in good repute at the moment.  He essentially replicated the relationship he had with the narrator multiple times through the years, taking a young woman under his wing (so to speak), mentoring and teaching and often taking her to bed.  He came of age when literature was king (at least that’s the way it seemed to me) and men like him dominated (Styron, Mailer, Bellow, Roth).  He had every reason to believe that world would continue.

It didn’t.  First his body changed: he was no longer the vital winning man who could attract young women (there was a particular occasion when he saw his 50-year-old body in a brightly lit mirror at a hotel and recoiled).  They might still sleep with him but not because they were attracted; they were now trying to get something from him.  Then the times turned against him: the days when professors slept with their students (quite common when I was in college) disappeared; it went from being a common occurrence to a firing offense.  A group of students got together and wrote a letter asking that he no longer call them “dear” (a request which our narrator understood, though she had been thrilled when he used that term with her).

He also found—and here the narrator agrees—the students rather lame as writers.  They no longer want to study the tradition; they just want to be heard.  They’re not interested in learning a craft (one student considering the narrator’s class e-mails to ask if she’s “overly concerned” with grammar and punctuation).  And of course, white men no longer dominate.  The interesting writers are women and people of color, whose voices were once stifled.

To some extent he’s facing what all old people face.  The way of life he once loved, and which he thought would go on forever, is disappearing.  (I read somewhere that Hemingway decided to take his life because he could no longer do all the things that had given him pleasure, hunting, fishing, writing, making love.)  There’s an implication that his own work had suffered as well.  It all depressed him, and he finally took his life.

I understand, I have to say.  I’m completely opposed to taking one’s life, but I can see how this man fell into a depression.  There is an opportunity in old age, to see that the things you once valued might not be the be all and end all of life, there might be simpler, more basic things that offer equal enjoyment.  Some people make the transition; others don’t.

As in What Are You Going Through, the ending is marvelous, and completely appropriate.  The next-to-last section is a stunner, which I wouldn’t name or give away, but it was brilliant even to conceive of it.  The final chapter—how can such a book have a happy ending?—is wonderful too.  It sees the sadness of life but celebrates its beauty.  I’m completely taken with Sigrid Nunez at this point, want to read everything she’s written.  But I would guess that these two most recent books are the apogee of her art.

She seems to be handling her age rather well.