The Friend by Sigrid Nunez is a postmodern novel reflecting on grief and loss. As revealed in the penultimate chapter, it is essentially a novel within a novel, charting the imagined relationship between the narrator and a dog left behind by a friend who recently killed himself. Through her relationship with the Great Dane, the unnamed narrator comes to terms with the unexpected and tragic loss, and she analyzes the complexity and emotional effects of what was perhaps the most consequential relationship of her life.

Plot Summary

The suicide of a close friend, a male writer and mentor, is causing the narrator to miss her own deadlines. . After the funeral, she meets the friend’s third wife in a café. Wife Three asks the narrator to take care of the dog the friend recently adopted, an aging Great Dane named Apollo. The dog has been pining for its dead owner, and though dogs are not permitted in the narrator’s apartment block, the narrator accepts. Once in the narrator’s apartment, Apollo mostly ignores her, but, for the narrator, having the dog is like having a small part of her friend with her, back from the dead. She decides that Apollo needs to fall in love with her instead of his dead owner, much the way she is trying to fall out of love with the dead man who was her former teacher and an unceasing presence in her life.

Apollo attracts a lot of attention around the neighborhood, and the narrator struggles to find a new home for him. He was found in a park by her dead friend and his old owner could not be found. Re-reading a book about the love between a dog and a man, the narrator sees parallels between the text and her friend’s life. She devises ways to care for Apollo, though a vet tells her that he is unlikely to live much longer. The dog is still in mourning.

Over time, the narrator cannot bear to be away from the dog. Despite multiple warnings from building management and an intervention from her deceased friend’s three wives, she has Apollo accredited as a service animal, which helps her to avoid eviction. She develops a (not untrue) reputation as a woman who is in love with her dog, and she explores this dynamic, and her grief, both in therapy and through an endless stream of thoughts on writers and writing, sharing her feelings by quoting the literature she loves.

Nunez tells the story in 12 parts, initially in first-person, addressing the deceased friend as “you.” In the penultimate part, however, the narrative changes to third-person perspective. A woman visits a friend who recently survived a suicide attempt. It is revealed that this woman is the author of the story about the narrator and Apollo the dog, and she has based this story on her own struggle with a friend’s near-death experience. The book the audience has been reading is, in actuality, the book she has been writing. The story closes from the perspective of the narrator, who has moved to the seaside to care for an increasingly old and infirm Apollo—and who has come to terms with the dog’s inevitable death, as well as the death of her friend.