This makes it all the nobler - I use that word deliberately - that the book works through despair to an endnote of acceptance and even hope. All of this being the low-level psychic buzz we carry within during our waking as well as our insomniac hours. (do I kill myself? am I always going to be alone? do I give up writing and try something else - and what?). The Friend renders the questions that comes over you at 3:00 a.m.

Still, the reader who makes their way through The Friend has to read every one of those tales at least once, and they all hurt. “ot a story I needed to hear twice,” Nunez says of one of the tales she relates, of pets abandoned (and, mercifully, found by more conscientious caretakers), of her narrator facing old age and perhaps homelessness (her apartment building has a rule against dogs), of the moments every writer comes to when they ask themselves just what in the hell they’re doing. Nunez’s novel does not, thank goodness, have the intensity of De Sica’s film (almost nothing does), but there are moments in it I found so piercing that I wondered who I could recommend it to: My girlfriend, whose cherished Maltese she has said will be her last dog? My ex- and best friend who recently lost the 21-year-old cat we raised together? My writer friends who are also teachers and would wince at Nunez’s descriptions of today’s English and writing undergraduates? The avid readers in my family, who are still raw from the shade of suicide that recently touched our family? In Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, the narrator, a writer whose best friend has committed suicide, takes the friend’s now ownerless Great Dane into her 500-square-foot New York City apartment.

The idea of seeing it, as 60 looms, is unthinkable.

Seeing it at 20 was like having fears I never entertained, fears of being old, destitute, and alone. I have never been so wiped out by a movie. is the work in which De Sica took his genius for melting the distance between the audience and the people on screen as far as it could go. The story of a proud and impoverished pensioner evicted from his rooming house along with his beloved dog, Umberto D. THE ONLY GREAT MOVIE I have no intention of ever seeing again is Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D.

Sigrid nunez the friend