Book Review Article
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend: a Novel. Penguin Random
House, 2018 (Riverhead Books paperback, 2019, 212 pp.)
Bereavement
Maybe a better title for this book would be Bereavement,
since that’s the main theme. We begin on the first page with a description of
Cambodian women who had gone through hideous traumatic experiences and who,
subsequently, appeared to have cried themselves blind. That, in a sense, is
what the narrator is doing throughout the pages of the novel: metaphorically
crying herself blind.
The unnamed first-person narrator, like the author herself,
lives in New York City and teaches creative writing in a university. They
appear to be about the same age (sixties or seventies), so Nunez, who at some
point has lost the tilde in her last name (that’s a different issue), must be
basing the action of the novel largely on her own experience. We do not know,
however, if she ever lost a best-friend-fellow-writer to suicide and,
subsequently, adopted that writer’s bereaved dog, a Great Dane. More on the dog
later.
A question never really answered: what, exactly, was the
narrator’s connection with the dead writer, the “You” to whom this novel is
told throughout? She remarks at one point that “Our relationship was a somewhat
unusual one.” Over the course of his life he had three wives, but she was not
one of them. She does, however, consider him a very special friend, and she
grieves for him as one grieves for a dead husband or lover. What was this man,
this “You” of the narrative, like? He was a highly successful writer of
fiction. “You had us believing that one day you’d win the Nobel Prize.” Like
the narrator, he taught creative writing at a university. This man was a
seducer of his female students, a cad by anyone’s at any time’s standards, and
by today’s exacting standards an insufferable cad.
Why did “You” commit suicide in late middle age, taking his
wives and friends by surprise? He was depressed, for one thing, because he was
getting older and could no longer enjoy screwing his students anymore. The new
generation of feminists, in fact, does not exactly approve of professors
screwing students. One group of them had lodged a complaint with the dean over
the way he called them all “dear.” Another problem was/is the state of creative
literature in the modern world—a major theme of the whole book. “You” complains
that “nobody in publishing seemed to care how anything was written anymore.” He
“had become dismayed by the ubiquity of careless reading,” and by the fact that
his students could not tell a good sentence from a bad one. Then again, he had
lost his “conviction in the purpose of fiction—today, when no novel, no matter
how brilliantly written or full of ideas, would have any meaningful effect on
society.” He was utterly dismayed by the way political correctness and “cancel
culture” ruled in the university ambiance. “What a load of crap,” he would say,
“making the university a ‘safe place.’”
Notwithstanding You’s considerable faults as judged by
modern standards, the narrator has always stood by him. When he dies she
collapses into something like a temporary madness that plagues her throughout
the narrative. At one point her friends organize an intervention, informing her
that she is in the throes of “pathological grief.” The magnitude of her
emotional crisis is described three-quarters of the way through the book (p.
154): (1) “my feeling of living with one foot in madness; (2) “no matter how much
I sleep I’m exhausted; (3) “the days when I don’t eat” (or eat nothing but
junk); (4) absurd fears: “What if there’s a gas leak and the building blows
up?”
This short novel is close to being over, and the narrator
describes herself as anxious about classes beginning in a week, having “open
wounds, hidden fears, loneliness, rage; never-ending grief.” Worst of all, her
only new friend in bereavement and loneliness (a dog) is aging and moribund. The
subject of suicide comes up periodically in the narrative. She muses at one
point that “it could be a rational decision, a perfectly sound choice, a
solution even” (but not for the young). She notes that suicides never get much
sympathy, that they are almost always condemned. Listening to a radio program,
she hears what those who call in have to say. “All the usual word-stones were
cast: sinful, spiteful, cowardly, vengeful, irresponsible. Sick. No one doubted
that the suicide had been in the wrong. A right to commit suicide simply did
not exist. Monsters of self-pity, suicides were. Such ingratitude for the
precious gift of life.”
Certain ancient sages, on the contrary, have opined that
“though generally to be condemned, [suicide] could be morally acceptable, even
honorable, as an escape from unbearable pain, melancholy, or disgrace—or even
just plain old boredom.” Meanwhile, she goes on suffering through her
bereavement, listening to “the monotonous woe-is-me of the mourning doves.” Her
therapist informs her pointedly that suicide is contagious. “One of the
strongest predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide.”
On
Writing and Writers
Some of the most creative of writers featured in the book
are panhandlers that the narrator comes across, holding signs or wearing
shirts. One drunk who “has pissed himself and is sprawled in a doorway,” wears
a tee shirt reading “I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny.” Nearby is a guy
with a handmade sign: “I used to be somebody.” I wonder if the most creative
signs might make for the most beggarly of moolah handed out to the beggars.
This would jibe with a major point of the book: that really creative lit gets
no respect anymore.
One of the most prominent themes of the whole book is the
theme of writing and writers, including the state of creative literary writing
in the modern world. At one point the narrator mentions that good writing is
all about rhythm: “Good sentences start with a beat.” Who in the book cares
about that, besides her. Publishers? No. Readers? No. The students in her
creative writing classes? Hell, no. A salient message of The Friend is
that creative writing of fiction these days is in one hell of a state. What’s
wrong with fiction writing and fiction writers and wannabe fiction writers
today? Many, many, many things, so tells us Sigrid Nunez through the
intermediation of her writer/teacher narrator.
For one thing, animosity is rife. “The literary world is
mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers, where jealousies and
rivalries are always being played out.” Something like a “sinking raft that too
many people are trying to get onto.” If you are already safely ensconced on the
raft, you must push those clamoring newbies away, which “makes the raft a
little higher for you.” After all, nobody much is reading fiction anymore—many
are reading nothing—so why do we need more writers to crank out stuff that
won’t be read? “In the news: 32,000,000 adult Americans can’t read. The
potential audience for poetry has shrunk by 2/3 since 1992.” “Whenever a writer
hits it big a lot of effort seems to go into trying to bring that person down.”
Well, sure, but nothing new there; we human beings are out to boost our egos by
way of deflating the egos of others. Human nature. Watch hummingbirds fighting
each other over a hummingbird feeder: that’s us.
Another thing: writers, so it seems, are not happy people,
and are ever more chagrined about the very thing they devote their lives to.
There are no more “feckless bohemians” among today’s writers—that went out long
ago. Today’s writers, at least in the U.S., are basically bourgeois. They don’t
hunker down in a rat hole in Greenwich Village, frenetically typing out the
great American novel on a manual typewriter while surviving on baked beans,
cigarettes and hot dogs. They teach creative writing in universities, where
they throw dinner parties for their fellow creative writing teachers. No
smoking allowed. There they sample fine wines and bitch about how stupid their
students are. Furthermore, “many writers today admit to feelings of
embarrassment and even shame about what they do.”
Want to be a bad guy? Be a writer. Writing, so says Georges
Simenon, is “not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” This astonishing
admission from a man who “wrote hundreds of novels under his own name, hundreds
more under two dozen pen names, and who, at the time of his retirement, was the
bestselling author in the world. Now, that’s a lot of unhappiness.” Nunez has
plenty more quotations from famous writers to back up her points. W.G. Sebald:
“There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted
persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to
be derived from it.”
Henry de Montherlant: “All writers are monsters.” Joan
Didion: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Rebecca West: “Any writer
worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than
partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to
read.” John Updike: “Whenever I see my books in a store, I feel as if I’ve
gotten away with something.”
Things have been bad enough for some time, but the new
efflorescence of sanctimony that has burgeoned in the Western world—this
tendency to judge harshly anyone who deviates even one eon from what are assigned
and enforced mores and behavior—has also come down hard on writers of fiction.
Famous writers themselves have contributed to this judgmental spirit. In a
pious mood one day Toni Morrison, e.g., “called basing a character on a real
person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’s not
for another to use it for fiction.” So we’re all personally copyrighted; we own
our own inviolate selves. An interesting notion, which suggests that Toni
Morrison is either (1) incredibly naïve about fiction writing and fiction
writers, or (2) lying to herself and others. Most likely #2. If she were still
alive I suppose she would support the latest absurd “rule” that any writer is
forced to follow: “If you’re not a Mexican you’re not allowed to write fiction
featuring Mexican characters and a Mexican setting. If you do, sucker, we’ll cancel
you!”
“It’s become entrenched, hasn’t it. This idea that what
writers do is essentially shameful and that we’re all somehow suspect
characters.” So says a fictionalized You, in Ch. 11, which amounts to a short
story the narrator writes, featuring her visit to a You who did not commit
suicide after all. This story also treats more of the silly BS being churned
out by “right-thinking” self-congratulators. About how writers are, largely, of
the white privileged society and therefore should not be allowed to write anymore.
“They shouldn’t write about themselves, because that furthers the agenda of the
imperialist white patriarchy. But they also shouldn’t be allowed to write about
other groups [say, Mexicans], because that would be cultural appropriation.”
Ah, the voices of the doctrinaire and dogmatic “illiberal left,” squeezing
tight their sanctimonious sphincters, informing all and sundry what we’re
allowed to say, what words we must use in saying it, and, ultimately, what
we’re allowed to think.
In that same short story of Ch. 11 the narrator seems to
speak approvingly of Svetlana Alexievich and her “documentary novels,” which
feature the voices of women speaking directly into the narrative. “No invention.
No authorial point of view.” Of course, most of her narrators are women; “women
make better narrators because they examine their lives and feelings in ways men
usually don’t, more intensely . . .” Here we speak approvingly of narrative
creative fiction void of creator or creativity: Just give me the facts, ma’am.
It’s only natural that there’s a twinge of feminism, male-bashing, in this
passage, given that some fifty years ago—with the feminist movement—is where so
much of this illiberal balderdash originated.
People who teach creative writing, so the narrator tells us,
are embarrassed to admit what they teach. They are, of course, working in a
university ambiance, where the tight-sphinctered proponents of “progressive”
notions explained above are in the ascendancy. They certainly must be
embarrassed as well by the very students they teach. At one point Nunez writes,
“The rise of self-publishing was a catastrophe.” Maybe so, but much, much
greater is the damage done to the American literary scene by the rise of creative
writing programs and the insipid published fiction that inundates the literary
world—fiction that comes, largely, from those very writing programs. Nunez
never directly makes that point, and for good reason: both she and her narrator
make a living by teaching in creative writing programs. But The Friend pulls
no punches in describing what the students of those programs are like in the
twenty-first century.
Creative Writing
Programs and Their Students
Flannery O’Conner quoted: “Only those with a gift should be
writing for public consumption.” Flannery O’Connor had a gift, which she
demonstrated early on, when she was a student in a creative writing program in
Iowa. She saw first-hand some of the problems with such programs way back when:
in the 1940s and 1950s. Another quote: “It’s dangerous to have students
critique each other’s manuscripts: the blind leading the blind.” Those problems
have now proliferated with the vast over-proliferation of creative writing
instruction in universities all over the U.S.
Could Flannery have done without whatever they taught her at
Iowa? Easily. She later said, in effect, that she already knew how to write
before she went to Iowa. But her stay there was certainly not wasted. There she
made the contacts that would ease her entry into the literary world of the
Eastern Establishment. Without the help and encouragement of writers and
intellectuals she met at Iowa, she might have returned to Milledgeville,
Georgia, and wasted away unknown, unpublished. Then again, she was young, a raw
talent when she arrived at Iowa. She had never heard, e.g., of Nikolai Gogol.
At Iowa one of her mentors suggested she read Gogol; she did, and was
influenced by him.
The narrator of The Friend tells us what it’s like to
teach creative writing twenty-five years into the twenty-first century. Not a
pretty story. In the first place, universities these days—flush with the
“progressive” principles, judgmental and self-righteous to the core—are bent on
restricting all sorts of academic freedom, both that of professors and
students. She describes how the profs at her place of employ all are required to
take an online course, Sexual Misconduct Training, in which they learn that
practically anything they say or do may be construed as sexual misconduct. She
does not say so, but I suppose that all students are also required to take such
a course. The narrator confesses to skimming over the materials, only to
discover that in the test she took at the end, she got two out of ten questions
wrong. Among other things, the narrator learns “that, yes, I was
required to report immediately any knowledge I might have of a teacher dating a
student, and that although not required I was strongly advised to report
a colleague for telling an off-color joke, even if the joke didn’t personally
offend me.”
No humor allowed, folks; after all, you might offend
somebody. Laughing is best always suppressed. Given the touchy-feely students
in the classroom, all hypersensitive to extremes, all needing to feel safe,
and all prepared to report violations of touchy-feely rules to the dean,
I’d guess that the modern-day prof must weigh his/her words extremely
carefully. The situation reminds me of the atmosphere in the Soviet Union in
Stalin’s time, when everyone spoke in whispers and there were stukachi
(informers) denouncing people right and left. Or in today’s Russia, for that
matter, where people can be arrested for calling Putin’s War a war.
Nowadays, so it appears, that fear of offending someone or
“triggering” something affects even the creative writing exercises that
students present for critique in class. So the narrator tells us, there is no
sex in the writings anymore. Sex is dangerous and potentially offensive, so
I better not put it in my story. The profs say they’re happy about this
development, since they could get in trouble for discussing sex in class! Then
again, discussing practically anything in class these days can get you in trouble.
I would suppose that the obligatory course in Sexual Misconduct also informs
the student how to go about properly engaging in sex—if anyone dares do
that at a modern university. You have to do it by the numbers, I’m sure, making
certain that the partner is okay with each step by asking caring questions as
you go along: is it okay if I hug you? Okay. Can I put my hand here, on your
knee? Okay. Would it offend you if I caressed (worry, worry) your breast? Until
you finally get—if all goes well—to the last question: would you mind very much
if I put my wiener in your slot? By the way, I did not make this last thing up—about
sex by the numbers. I heard it advocated in all seriousness by a member of the
illiberal left.
The narrator informs us in some detail about what attitudes
her students have toward the English language, toward words and creative
literature. One English major thinks you put a period after a question mark.
Another student is thinking of taking her course but sends out a questionnaire
in advance. One of the questions: “Are you overconcerned with things like
punctuation and grammar?” Student A complains about all the reading assigned:
“I don’t want to read what other people write, I want people to read what I
write.”
Sad fact: today’s creative writing students—at least the
ones who have passed through the narrator’s classes, and You’s as well—don’t know
zilch about creative writing. They don’t know what good creative writing is,
nor do they care. They do not care to read it, much less write it. Their social
consciences are running amuck, and they want the voices of the oppressed, the
insulted and the injured to be heard. When told that Rilke claimed writing “is
a religion requiring the devotion of a priest,” they laugh derisively: ridiculous.
That idea was pretty well accepted, says the narrator, when she was coming
along. Now it’s universally absurd. In his imaginary dialogue with the narrator
in Ch. 11, You says, “another thing I noticed about the students: how
self-righteous they’ve become, how intolerant they are of any weakness or flaw
in a writer’s character . . . I once had an entire class agree that it didn’t
matter how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that—a snob and a pervert, as
they saw him—shouldn’t be on anyone’s reading list.” Anybody really interested
in highly creative, artistic literature can only gape in astonishment at that
evaluation—by a group of young dolts—of one of the greatest creative writers of
the twentieth century.
The situation is so egregious that it calls for drastic
measures. As for Nunez and her narrator—I mentioned this previously, but it
bears repeating—neither of them can advocate such measures since their income
depends on teaching in creative writing programs. The solution is one I have
advocated previously—see a variety of postings on my blog and on the Dactyl
Review website, where I have treated this subject in exhausting detail. The
solution is to abolish all creative writing programs in all American universities.
The state of creative literary fiction in this country would be much improved
by such a measure. If there were at least one dissenting voice in that
classroom of dolts advocating “cancelling” Nabokov, there might be some hope.
Given that there were zero dissenting voices—a unanimity of doltitude—one can
only declare the situation hopeless: abolish all creative writing programs. Let
the writing students who hate Tolstoy, Hemingway, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Flannery
O’Connor (yes, Flannery too makes some of the cancellation lists), everybody
worth reading, get a job somewhere worthy of their talents: say, in McDonald’s,
flipping burgers.
Or maybe let a few creative writing programs continue to
function, in, say, five or so American universities. Admission to these
programs would require passing an entrance exam. Here is one of the
multiple-choice questions: Why do you want to be a writer? (a) because I
want to make the world a better place; (b) because I want to improve the lot of
the insulted and injured of the earth; (c) because I want to produce a new kind
of literature, all touchy-feely and safe, a literature having nothing in common
with that written by the many nasty dead white men of the world; (d) because
I’m in love with words and my dream is to write beautiful sentences. Anyone
checking any box but “d” would automatically fail the exam. After all, there’s
really no good reason for becoming a writer of literary fiction except being in
love with words. And I don’t mean writing the dreck that’s called literary
fiction all over the Eastern Establishment these days; I mean highly creative
literary fiction.
One small ray of optimism lies in the fact that Sigrid
Nunez—although complicit in the creative-writing-program racket and all the
gruesomeness that it entails—has, nonetheless written a good novel. She’s not
Proust or Nabokov, but with The Friend she has written a lovely little novella
reeking in literary creativity. Bravo.
A Bereaved Woman and
Her Bereaved Dog
NB: in the final chapter the one addressed by the narrator
as “you” is no longer You: the new you is her best friend and partner, the
Great Dane named Apollo. I would guess that most readers of this book—little
interested in the egregiousness of creative writing programs and the sad lot of
literature—follow with most interest the narrative line of woman/dog and
dog/woman. For this is a unique story about someone who becomes “the emotional
support human” for a dog. Of course, had her emotions been anything other than
skewed after the suicide of her friend, she never would have taken on the
burden of keeping a dog that large in a small apartment in New York City.
Where, incidentally, all pets are prohibited.
She takes on the care of Apollo out of some sense of duty
toward her friend. No one else wants his dog, who loved You and was loved by
You. The dog, it so happens, is also in a state of bereavement, missing
terribly his previous master, and he never gets over the loss. So that the book
describes a woman leading a dog through a strange haze of bewilderment and
grief. Sounds like a bummer. Especially since, when the narrator becomes
attached to the dog she abandons all other friends and devotes herself solely
to Apollo—whose life expectancy is already short when she acquires him. So that
this thing can certainly not end well.
Since she is already in a deep emotional crisis over her recently
demised friend, one does not even care to imagine how she will feel after her
new only friend dies: which he does on the last page of the book. Oddly enough,
the book is so well-written and entertaining that this dismal plot does not
propel the reader into a depression. We (or at least I) prefer not to think
about what happens after the action of the narrative is done. Which is one more
advertisement for the writing of good sentences.
You can learn a lot about dogs by reading this book. You
learn, e.g., some of the perils of being a pure pedigree dog. The message seems
to be that God loves mutts best of all. “Idiot collies, neurotic shepherds,
murderous Rottweilers, deaf Dalmatians, and Labs so calm you could shoot a gun
at them and they wouldn’t suspect danger.” The Great Dane breed, that of the
secondary hero of the book, has some bad press as well. The Danes are known to
be dumb and have a very short life expectancy. As the narrator discovers, they
poop copiously, and her efforts to deal with this while walking Apollo on the
streets of New York furnish much entertainment to passersby.
Another example: there are “pointers that freeze in point
posture and then can’t get out.” Sounds impossible, a sick joke, but apparently
it’s true. Even more interesting is what you learn about people who are avid
dog lovers, people who, ever increasingly in our modern world, have a best
friend, or even lover, who is a dog. The narrator cites the book, My Dog
Tulip, by J.R. Ackerley (1896-1967). Thoroughly in love with a dog, the
lovestruck Ackerley details his “fifteen-year marriage, the happiest years of
his life.” Here we touch upon the subject of buggery, which, I suppose, makes
for a satisfactory sex life for some people nowadays. Different strokes for
different folks. The so-called “Incels,” young male women haters who can’t get
laid, might consider this option: buy a dog.
The narrator takes Apollo to the vet, “the sort of man who
speaks to women as if they are idiots and to older women as if they are deaf
idiots.” The vet says, “Whoever trained him made him understand that humans are
the alphas, and you don’t want him to start thinking otherwise. You don’t want
him getting it into his head that he’s the alpha.” The vet’s parting remark:
“the last thing you want is for him to start thinking you’re his bitch.” We
don’t know what Apollo is thinking, though thinking appears to be not his métier.
But by the end of the book—although the possibility of buggery is excluded—it
appears that the narrator is close to becoming exactly that: his bitch.
As mentioned above, the very act of walking a Great Dane on
the streets of New York creates a sensation. As older woman walking a big dog,
the narrator does not have to put up with men’s off-color remarks, as she had
to when she was a young, attractive woman walking a big (different) dog. This
made me sympathize with what young women, especially the pretty ones, have to
put up with from various idiot swinging dicks. I’d imagine that not being
pretty is even somewhat to be preferred. Or being old, since the old, neither
men nor women, get the least bit of attention from anyone.
Then there are the problems that come with an aging pet. As
the narrator declares, “I want Apollo to live as long as I do. Anything less is
unfair.” That statement is indicative of a sea-change in attitudes toward pets
in the U.S. over the past 50-60 years. When I was young (long time ago) nobody
would think of treating a dog as if it were a human being. Now vast numbers of
human beings do exactly that, and those human beings spend exorbitant amounts
of cash treating the ailments of pets, and even keeping moribund pets alive.
What does that say about the attachments people have these days? And about the
epidemic of loneliness that has spread all over the U.S.?
d
Appendix:
List of My Jeremiads Against the Creative Writing Racket
(Available
on the Blog, “U.R. Bowie on Russian Literature” and on the website Dactyl
Review)
Analysis and Critique of George
Saunders book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, with particular reference
to his insipid, BS-laden “workshoppy” presentation of the Anton Chekhov short
story, “In the Cart.” In a different posting I present my own critical analysis
of the same story.
Book Review Article: Best
American Short Stories, 2017. About how the “best” stories are often not
very good. About the dull and tired genre of “domestic literary fiction,”
produced largely by writers who come out of MFA programs in creative writing.
“The Great American Boondoggle (On
the Sad State of the Short Story)” More on “domestic literary fiction,” on the
insipidity of the “New Yorker story” and the ubiquity of bad published fiction.
