The Friend

“And: Now he’s officially a dead white male.”

The Friend is an example of self-aware literary fiction. In the above quote, a mourner at a deceased writer’s funeral makes a joke about the nature of the literary canon. By dying, the author has entered the cadre of dead white males whose works comprise the literary canon. The comment is a wry, ironic aside, a joke the deceased friend himself might have loved. It also depicts humor as another way humans try to deal with grief.

“But that’s what age is, isn’t it? Slo-mo castration. (Am I quoting you here? Did I get this from one of your books?)”

As the narrator continues to process her grief, unable to even focus on a meeting with Wife Three without her thoughts rambling back to the deceased and his life, she begins to merge her own thoughts with things that he may once have said. Their minds are interlinked in a platonic fashion, their thoughts so similar that they may as well be the same person. This connection is why her sense of grief is so palpable, and the closeness of their relationship so evident: Now, she can no longer distinguish between her own thoughts and the snippets of writing she may well remember from her friend’s books.

“You can’t explain death. And love deserves better than that.”

Humans cannot verbally explain grief to an animal, and they often do no better explaining it to themselves. By caring for the dog, the narrator processes her difficult relationship with the deceased, exploring her emotions through her relationship with his dog. The introduction of Apollo the dog into the narrator’s life will entail not only physical changes but also emotional changes, as the dog becomes a proxy for the narrator’s grief.

“And what, after all, is in a dog’s name?”

Now that Apollo lives in the narrator’s home, she tries to discern his “real” name: the one he may have had before he was rescued. She alludes to semiotics, poststructuralism, and other modes of literary criticism—appropriate avenues of investigation for characters so thoroughly steeped in the world of literature—in her attempt to determine the animal’s true name. Even when thinking about a name, however, the ghost of her friend’s presence lingers; she cannot not think about him.

“Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright.”

In this chapter, the narrator discusses the act of writing as a therapeutic process and whether this description has any artistic merit. Irony is at play here, as these thoughts are included in a piece of writing that masquerades as a cathartic self-examination. Additionally, the narrator processes grief by searching through the works of acclaimed writers, seeking a piece of knowledge or understanding that will help her make sense of her life and her emotions, a solace that she struggles to find.

“Not brutal enough was the response from a group of Moldovan prostitutes who were asked to watch the film.”

Lilya 4-Ever, a film about human trafficking, has left a lasting impression on the narrator. When consulted about the film’s contents, however, those who have actually experienced human trafficking suggest that the film is “not brutal enough” (46). The narrator realizes she understands very little of what happened to these women; although she is a writer and an empathic person, those who have not endured such emotional and physical horrors cannot adequately express them with words. Similarly, the narrator, a professional wordsmith, cannot articulate the inexplicable nature of suicide, or communicate the weight of grief—and these are experiences she is struggling with firsthand.

“The same nouns: knife, belt, rope, bottle, fist, scar, bruise, blood. The same verbs: force, beat, whip, burn, choke, starve, scream.”

When reviewing stories written by the victims of sex trafficking, the narrator struggles with the extreme violence they depict. She tries to process the trauma by viewing the work through a solely literary lens, dividing the words into nouns and verbs, stripping them of emotional context. These women attempt to address their PTSD as a literary exercise, but as a writer who already knows the exercises too well, the narrator uses academic distance to avoid letting herself feel pain and loss.

“The thing that keeps me from becoming a complete misanthrope is seeing how much dogs love men.”

The emotional intelligence of dogs is well established in the novel. Apollo mourns the death of his former owner, and the narrator lists numerous dogs who have demonstrated similar displays of mourning. Though she would be happy to completely divest herself of humanity and men, the narrator believes that, if these dogs see something worth loving in men, then she should abstain from loathing men herself.

“He has to forget you and fall in love with me.”

Apollo has mourned the death of his owner every single day. Although the narrator has taken on the care of the dog, she can neither fill the emotional void in Apollo’s life nor explain the concepts of loss or grief to him. Her solution is to shift Apollo’s focus away from the dead man and toward her, but this is a symbiotic process; so she can move on, she, too, is working to stop loving her dead friend and love his dog instead.

“Now she became the one I could not stop thinking about.”

Like many of her remembered stories, the botched euthanasia of the narrator’s “least favorite” cat (when the cat is about to be killed, the vet makes an error and takes the cat from the room, returning with it already dead) is a proxy for the grief and guilt she feels over her friend’s suicide. She is not able to be with the cat in its final seconds and feels guilty for not being present at the end. If Apollo needs to be euthanized, the narrator is beginning to suspect, then the pain will be all the worse.

“A literary Manson family.”

In using the murderous Charles Manson family in the late 1960s as a metaphor for their own circle, they are comparing their relationships with the friend to those the charismatic Manson had with his followers. When discussing the deceased man with Wife One, the narrator reflects on the esteem with which both regarded their teacher. Though he would go on to form lasting relationships with both—one as a wife, the other as a friend—both viewed him with more the adoration of fans than the warmth of romance or friendship. Though they did not commit actual acts of violence, it could be argued that their relationships were similarly combustible, and likewise doomed.

“Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo—beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo—I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?”

At this point in the novel, the connection between Apollo and the sense of grief over the narrator’s dead friend, which before was only implied, is made explicit. She knows that the dog cannot replace her friend, but she acknowledges that by helping the dog, she has tried to help her friend in death in ways she couldn’t help in life. She wonders if her love for Apollo is merely a proxy for the love she feels for her dead friend, and if her efforts to help Apollo are all part of a futile effort to will her friend back from the dead.

“Not that it doesn’t also lead to lying your head off.”

The nature of truth in the text is fleeting and hard to grasp; after all, the very nature of the truth, presented in confessional letters supposedly written from a grieving friend to a person who is has died, shares the truth only as seen from her perspective. She is almost an archetype of the unreliable narrator, who through the act of writing produces confessions and lies in equal measure. She remembers and recollects, though at times these memories are subjective or incomplete.

“Miracle or no miracle, whatever happens, nothing is going to separate us.”

The narrator is no longer she considering a new home for Apollo; instead, she has decided that she values him more than the rent-controlled apartment she had originally wanted to keep at any cost. Apollo has become such an essential part of her life, a permanent replacement for her departed friend, that she cannot ever imagine leaving him alone, nor can she bear to lose him, as it would be like losing her friend all over again.

“You do realize, says Wife One, that you’re committing fraud.”

When facing eviction for owning a dog in her apartment, the narrator has Apollo accredited as a service animal—an act, she hopes, that will allow him to stay with her. Wife One suggests that she is committing fraud, but the word “fraud” is operative: For all intents and purposes, Apollo is very much a service animal playing an essential role in the narrator’s life. That Wife One would warn of fraud suggests she does not appreciate the full extent of the narrator’s grief.

“It’s not that I can’t say how I feel. It’s very simple. I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss you very much.”

For the first time, the narrator admits that she misses her friend. It is a short, sharp admission, buried between other thoughts; for example, in the paragraph following this quote, she begins to discuss Wittgenstein, a scholarly digression juxtaposed against the preceding concise sentiment of grief. Her mind flits back and forth between subjects, her thoughts disorganized, sporadic, and pessimistic. The novel’s structure reflects the fractured way in which the narrator deals with grief.

“I want Apollo to live as long as I do. Anything less is unfair.”

After a lifetime of watching her friend spend time with other people, the narrator now worries that she will have to watch Apollo die. The time she has spent with the dog has made her regret the time she did not spent with her friend; her relationship with the dog becomes a surrogate for the time she and her friend lost. Now that she has a friend with whom she spends time, she never wants that time to be taken away from her. The death of Apollo would not only be the death of a beloved dog but also a second death of the narrator’s friend.

“Something bad happens to the dog.”

As the narrator becomes acutely aware of Apollo’s mortality, she places his potential suffering into a familiar context, thinking about the numerous animals that have died or suffered in books she has read. She has also processed the death of her friend this way: She has thought about suicides of literary figures, whether authors or characters, and has tried to find solace in comparing these events with those in her own life. In acknowledging that “something bad happens to the dog” (109), the narrator comes to terms with the fact that her dog will one day die, and the relief she has found in his company will be gone.

“For some time now I have imagined it ending like this.”

As the novel draws to a close, the narrator deals with the potential death of the dog who has come to replace her friend, and she begins to think about how the story ends. She confesses that she has been thinking about this for some time. In many ways, this is a form of suicidal ideation; she is thinking about her own death, though placing it in a literary context divorces her from the raw emotion and the truth of what is happening. Thoughts of her own demise are beginning to consume her.

“You scoff, but you can’t deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity.”

At this stage of the novel, this quote functions as a commentary on the novel itself. There are many points in the text where the narrator has been explicitly dealing with her own ego and her own psyche. Furthermore, the elitism in the text has been evident, replete as it is with mentions of famous literary figures and subtle derision of the students who have not read their work. In many ways, the novel—and the novel within the novel—argues that writing can be an elitist, egotistic activity yet still remain worthwhile.

“And I forgot all about the movie and started imagining what it would’ve been like if you hadn’t been stopped.”

In this moment, the woman reveals that the novel she has been writing is the one that—up until this point—the audience has been reading. The narrator is an imagined version of the woman; the deceased friend, whose suicide is completed, is an imagined version of what may have happened if her friend had succeeded, also. Jip, the small dachshund, has been reimagined as a Great Dane. To that end, everything that has been written up until this point has not been an authentic exploration of grief, but an imagined exploration of potential grief. In one chapter, the author has turned the novel in an entirely different direction.

“DEFEAT THE BLANK PAGE”

Now that the novel’s true nature has been revealed, this isolated page reveals why the previous chapter has been structured as such. The woman—speaking through the voice of the narrator—has been searching for a way to deal with both her writer’s block and the distress she felt following her friend’s suicide attempt. She pours these feelings into her writing, wrestling with the blank page just as she’s grappling with her own complicated emotions.

“I’ll need a sign when it gets to be too much.”

Now returning to the voice of the narrator, the narrator asks the dog to tell her when it “gets to be too much” (128); in reality, she makes a vicarious plea to her deceased friend. The woman who is actually writing the book is also pleading with the man whom she hopes, following his own failed suicide attempt, will tell her if it all becomes too much. Through the medium of the novel, she offers her support: The narrator functions as the author’s proxy, just as the dog becomes a stand-in for the man.