What I’ve Been Reading: The Friend
A close friend dies through suicide, and the custody of his harlequin great Dane is forced upon the narrator. Like her late friend and mentor, she is a writer. Sylvia Nunez’s brief volume touches on many topics – what do animals experience? What does one owe to a dead friend? How does one deal with death? With grief? What is the role of a writer in presenting a world? Is writing worth the trouble?
Recently lost a close friend who was in the last stages of metastasized pancreatic cancer chose to take his own life (through Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” process). He planned his death well in advance and let his friends and family know. Now whenever I see an obit saying “he died peacefully at home surrounded by the love of family and friends” I’ll wonder if it was an assisted suicide.
I miss my friend, though we didn’t see each other often. He was a polymath, a gifted artist, a meticulous woodworker, a creative thinker and writer, a fascinating talker and persuader. It doesn’t seem at all sensible that the accumulated knowledge of a lifetime should just go poof!
I liked the role the dog played, as a silent companion in mourning. What does an animal know of death? We have the stories of Greyfriars Bobby who reportedly spent fourteen years guarding his master’s grave, and of Hachiko, who went daily to meet his master at the Shibuya train station for ten years after the master’s death. Is this behavior a testament to loyalty, an example of undying hope, or merely the force of habit? We can can only funble in the dark, imagining what happens in another creature’s brain.
I am a writer, so the views of other writers on the process are always interesting to me. I’ve come to believe that there are two types of writers. Type one is exemplified by Nunez’s narrator and her mentor/friend and maybe Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf: writing is painful, torturous, words dragged out of you one by one, agonizing over every phrase. Each word must be true; the whole must beautiful. Writers block is a constant hazard; rejected drafts fill the wastebasket and litter the floor.
Type two is exemplified by me, and maybe Neil Gaiman, Lee Child, and other writers of popular fiction. Writing is a pleasure, if there is a story I want to tell. Gloria Steinem said “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel like I should be doing something else.” I agree with that. Though I often procrastinate, basically I want to tell the story. Yes, the tale should be shapely, it should have real characters, and if possible an arc of conflict and resolution. The story might not have a happy ending but the process of writing it doesn’t hurt.
In the last chapter of The Friend, Nunez shatters the wall of belief by imagining (or reporting?) an actual conversation with an actual friend who had an actual dog and was a failed suicide; I think this shift breaks faith with the reader, who has gone along with the world Nunez has created, and then is told that it was all a trick. The device is a clever ploy quite suitable for a National Book Award winner though; those awards seem often to be given to authors who do tricks with time and space and the role of the narrator. I don’t care for those tricks; I find them confusing. I just want to tell the story.
