December 4, 2017
In the riveting new novel from Nunez (Salvation City), the unnamed narrator thinks in the second person, addressing an unnamed old friend, a man, who has recently and unexpectedly committed suicide. The two first met decades earlier, while she was his student, the same semester in fact, when a fellow student became “Wife One” of three. While wives and lovers have come and gone, the narrator has remained a constant, friendly intimate of the deceased, a platonic yet intense and complex relationship. Mourning, she begins writing a cathartic elegy that becomes a larger meditation on writing, loss, and various forms of love. Early in the book, Wife Three calls to ask if the narrator will take responsibility for a large Great Dane named Apollo, whom the man had found abandoned in Central Park. Despite the unexpectedness of the request, the narrator takes the dog home, and over the course of the rest of the novel, her love for Apollo both consumes and heals her. This elegant novel explores both rich memories and day-to-day mundanity, reflecting the way that, especially in grief, the past is often more vibrant than the present.
December 1, 2017
This is very much a writer's novel. The unnamed narrator is an author who teaches composition, as is the eponymous friend. They met in a college writing class--she a student, he the professor--and he went on to marry another student from the same class. This would be one of his three wives, only referred to as "wife one," "wife two," and "wife three." Wife three was married to the friend when he committed suicide unexpectedly, leaving behind a Great Dane he'd recently adopted. The narrator takes the dog reluctantly and begins a journey of self-discovery. In the hands of many authors, a premise like this would be corny, but Nunez (Salvation City; The Last of Her Kind) has a subtle, ironic tone that makes it work. Was she in love with her friend? Was he a terrible person, or is the narrator exaggerating because he has died? These answers aren't important, and not much happens in terms of plot. Instead, this is a slow, poignant meditation on grief, rife with pithy literary myths and quotations. VERDICT Literature nerds, creative writing students, and dog lovers will find this work delightful. Recommended for literary fiction collections.--Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 1, 2018
The narrator's friend, a famous writer at the height of a long and successful career, killed himself and left no suicide note. What he did leave was a jealous wife and a Great Dane named Apollo, adopted when the narrator found him abandoned in the park. The wife won't keep the dog. So, driven by guilt and grief, the narrator opts to take him, even at the risk of losing her rent-controlled apartment. She can't bear the idea of another abandonment while she herself feels abandoned. They set off to build a relationship and get through their mutual grief. In rambling streams of consciousness, she recalls her relationship with the writer as a former student, a longtime friend, and a fellow writer. Onlookers wonder at the human-canine friendship, even as the narrator plunges into an existential crisis, examining her own life, writing, and the bond between dogs and humans. Adjusting and adapting, she and Apollo ultimately find comfort and salvation. Nunez (Sempre Susan, 2011) offers an often-hilarious, always-penetrating look at writing, grief, and the companionship of dogs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)
Starred review from October 15, 2017
Quietly brilliant and darkly funny, Nunez's (Sempre Susan, 2011, etc.) latest novel finds her on familiar turf with an aggressively unsentimental interrogation of grief, writing, and the human-canine bond. After her best friend and mentor's suicide, an unnamed middle-aged writing professor is bequeathed his well-behaved beast of a dog. Apollo is a majestic, if aging, Great Dane, whom her friend--like all the human characters, unnamed--found abandoned in Brooklyn and kept, against the rather reasonable protests of his third and final wife. And so, in the midst of her overwhelming grief for the man whose life has anchored hers, the woman agrees to take in the animal, despite the exceedingly clear terms of her rent-stabilized lease. Apollo, too, is grieving, in his doggy way--after his master's death, he waited by the door round the clock ("you can't explain death to a dog," says Wife Three); now, in the woman's care, he throws himself listlessly on the bed, all 180 pounds of him. And though she is a self-professed cat person--not because she prefers them, but because they are less indiscriminately devoted ("Give me a pet that can get along without me")--the two become unlikely companions in mourning, eventually forming the kind of bond Rilke once described as love: "two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other." In contemplating her current situation--the loss, the dog--the woman is oriented by art: not just Rilke but Virginia Woolf, J.M. Coetzee, the relentlessly grim Swedish film Lilya 4-Ever, Joy Williams, Milan Kundera, the British writer J.R. Ackerley in love with his dog. It is a lonely novel: rigorous and stark, so elegant--so dismissive of conventional notions of plot--it hardly feels like fiction. Breathtaking both in pain and in beauty; a singular book.
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