37 pages • 1 hour read
The Friend
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Parts 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary
The novel opens with the story of female war refugees in Cambodia who visited their doctors with a common complaint: They could no longer see.
The unnamed female narrator then begins to reflect on the recent suicide of a loved one. She is struggling to deal with the loss and has cried so much and so often that she has given herself a “throbbing headache for days” (9). She thinks back on her friends’ writing and his habits; the grief is causing her to miss deadlines. The man’s third wife arranges a memorial service, though those who knew him better believed that he would consider such a service “repugnant.” The narrator attends, mingling with the fellow mourners, but leaves early. She reflects on various literary-related suicides.
The narrator worries about why Wife Three wants to talk to her. Thinking about her relationship with the deceased, the narrator says that it was “somewhat unusual” (14) because “you were, to an almost pathological degree, incapable of being alone” (14). There were three wives and many girlfriends. In recent years, the narrator has only been able to keep in touch “mainly through email” (15) but is somewhat afraid to go to the man’s house. She thinks about tears and the act of crying and how it relates to blindness.
The narrator meets Wife Three in a “charming European-style café” (17). Unlike the man’s previous wives, Wife Three was a similar age and many of his friends were surprised. Wife Three has been “polite but distant toward [the narrator], content to accept [the narrator] as one of [the man’s] oldest friends while herself remaining only [the narrator’s] acquaintance” (18). Wife Two, conversely, was very jealous and “never would believe we weren’t fucking” (19), though they did “once. Years ago” (19). The narrator had been in the man’s class, as was Wife One.
Wife Three talks about her own experiences with suicide; her deceased husband’s depression, she reveals, was “never worse […] than in those six months last year” (21). The man also acquired a dog, Wife Three says, “a harlequin Great Dane” (22) named first Dino and then Apollo. The narrator remembers how the man’s students had written to him, complaining “about being addressed as ‘dear’” (23) as it was “demeaning” and “inappropriate” (23). This came after a lifetime of many student-teacher romances, as “promiscuity had always been second nature” (25) to the man. Middle age, however, had the effect of “a kind of castration” (25) as he realized that he was no longer desired by younger women. The narrator likens the man to David Lurie from J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
Wife Three finally gets to her point: She asks the narrator to take the dog and “give him a home” (27). Dogs are not allowed in the narrator’s apartment building and she is “a cat person” (28). The narrator refuses but offers to “ask around.” Wife Three worries that the dog will end up “complicating my already complicated feelings” (28). The dog is currently in a kennel; “you can’t explain death to a dog” (29), she explains, and the dog has been pining for its deceased owner. The narrator feels her heart break as Wife Three begs her to take the dog.
Part 2 Summary
The narrator agrees to take in Apollo, who “mostly ignores [her]” (31). She believes that “having your dog here is like having a part of you here” (31). Apollo sleeps on her bed and she sleeps beside him; once a night, he rouses and inspects her as “an object of intense fascination” (32). Hector, the building superintendent, has told her that she “cannot keep that animal […] not even temporary” (33). Apollo has become “a neighborhood wonder” and always attracts attention.
The narrator struggles to find a new home for Apollo. She worries about being evicted from her rent-controlled New York City apartment. The narrator thinks about Apollo’s real name, about what it might be, and whether having a “real” name even matters. She “[balks] at the idea of dominating an animal” (36), which is one reason she prefers cats.
The dog was found in a park, “without collar or tags” (37), and no one claimed him. He might have been turned loose by an owner who could no longer afford him, the narrator hears, or he might have been stolen. Maybe, she thinks “Apollo’s owner had died, and it was whoever then came into possession of him who threw him out” (37). The deceased man once told the narrator how he had found Apollo, a moment “so thrilling and so uncanny that you could almost believe he’d been magicked there” (37).
Part 3 Summary
The narrator considers homeless people and their relationship to dogs. The narrator prepares her lecture notes, ready to give a writing class, and endures her office hours. She thinks about different writers’ descriptions of writing, both as a means of catharsis and therapy. Does it matter, she wonders, if a book written for cathartic purposes “is any good?” (40).
She recalls having been invited to “teach a writing workshop at a treatment center for victims of human trafficking” (41). She remembers a time when she read a story by such a victim in a different workshop, who believed that “writing saved her life” (42). Before attending the workshop where the narrator was teaching, the women “were encouraged to keep journals” (43). Many of the women said that they thought “the best thing for me would be to die” (43). Though many refuse, some women “took happily to journaling” (43) and they are the ones who are invited to the workshops. The narrator sees artwork made by the victims, full of violent imagery.
This experience brings to mind a particularly harrowing film called Lilya 4-Ever, which depicted a victim of human trafficking; after the film ended, the narrator experienced “a humiliating feeling” (45) and had no desire to see the film again, even though it was good. Victims of human trafficking, however, have described the film as “not brutal enough” (46). The narrator thinks about people who have endured great pain and then developed psychosomatic conditions such as mutism or blindness, like victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia mentioned in Part 1.
The narrator agreed not to use any of the trafficked women’s experiences in her writing, but was able to use the work of the psychologist who helped them. With the help of her deceased friend, she soon “had a contract and a deadline” (48). She remembers a talented writer that she studied alongside who gave up writing as a profession after a Buddhist retreat as she could not “reconcile a literary career with the goal of freedom from attachment” (49). Writers, to her, seemed to be “in a state of chronic frustration” (50) and she becomes disillusioned with the entire profession. The woman becomes an archetype with whom the narrator is familiar: “the student who graduates from a writing program and goes on to…renounce writing” (51). In the writing workshop, when asked to write about an object which was important to them, almost half the women wrote about dolls; “all but one of the dolls came to a bad end” (51). The work produced by the women contains many of the same verbs and nouns, most of which are violent. The class is the last thing the narrator and her dead friend ever discussed.
Parts 1-3 Analysis
At the very beginning of the novel, the narrative mode is very particular. The audience is introduced to an unnamed narrator, who describes the recent suicide of her (also unnamed) close friend. The text is broken up into sections, which can last pages, paragraphs, or sentences. The prose reads like scattered thoughts or random diary entries, as likely to describe a treasured memory as a mundane task. The broken, direct, and raw first-person perspective allows the reader to understand the nature of the narrator’s grief; just like the prose itself, the emotion is complex and unrefined, difficult to express directly.
The opening story of victims of the Khmer Rouge, who may have literally cried themselves blind from grief and sorrow, sets up two critical themes in the book: the consequences of exploitation (in all stages of intensity) and the relentless agony of grief. The narrative then pivots to the narrator’s reflections on her friend’s death. Their years-long friendship was close, mostly platonic, but complicated by a past sexual encounter. Thus, her attempts to navigate her grief are made all the more complex by the man’s various wives and girlfriends.
As the novel develops, the narrator will explore her friend’s character, his oft-sexual entanglements with his students, and her own confusion about what she meant to him in the context of the mentor/mentee power dynamic they shared.
Throughout these early chapters, one of the most important stylistic choices the author makes involves names. Nunez does not typically name her characters, and the names that do appear belong to famous writers and thinkers. The narrator is liable to reference and cite people such as Flaubert, Coetzee, and Woolf, all while leaving out the names of her closest friends and associates. This choice emphasizes the importance of literary criticism and culture to the characters’ lives. The emotions they express are almost always secondhand, parsed through the views and writings of other, more famous people. By discussing writers by name and her friends in vague terms, the narrator distances herself from her current physical pain and raw emotion and draws closer to these writers she does not know, borrowing their words and experiences to make sense of her grief rather than draw on real relationships. The narrator’s discussion of whether a book written for cathartic purpose can truly be good also foreshadows a critical revelation in Part 11: The story is a novel within a novel, written by another woman who asks herself the same question.
The dog Apollo is named, which emphasizes that, like her beloved writers and works of literature, Apollo serves primarily as a lens through which the narrator processes grief and pain. The difference here is that the narrator will develop a close and fierce bond with the dog. Also, the name “Apollo” invokes not a writer but a powerful Greek god. Apollo’s character is brought into sharp focus by the discussion of whether the name suits him. The narrator invites the audience to compare the nature of the name with the nature of the dog, depicted throughout the novel as capable of sensitivity and attachment. As one of the few named characters, Apollo becomes an emotional focal point for the reader, just as he is for the narrator.
