The Friend
Sigrid Nunez · 2018
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 case against
Quotation does much of the lifting: Ackerley, Wittgenstein, half the syllabus of a writing seminar, a commonplace book with a Great Dane walking through it. The dead mentor being mourned is a serial seducer of his students whom the narrator keeps polishing anyway, and a late metafictional swerve unsettles what little story there was. Lovely sentences, in search of a novel.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
