A new leash on life
Or, the wisdom of Sigrid Nunez
This continuing pandemic has reportedly caused a surge in dog ownership, perhaps because it’s the one sure way you’ll be allowed daily walks outside your home. Across Europe, offers of leash leases to skirt curfews have spiked.
So, should you get a dog? On this issue, consult Groucho Marx:
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Which clearly implies you should get a book about someone who gets a dog, and it should be The Friend, the excellent 2018 novel by Sigrid Nunez.
Nunez was a well-regarded but narrowly known author until the publication of The Friend, her seventh novel, won the National Book Award and made her a sort of patron saint of writers. (Like all writers, she remains narrowly known by TikTok standards.)
Oh right, the dog. The friend in the title comes into the story when a New York writing teacher inherits her late mentor’s Great Dane. As she grapples with both her loss and her gain, she turns to the wisdom of the ages. The ages, it turns out, are quite clever.
Walking with Samuel Beckett one fine spring morning, a friend of his asked, Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive? I wouldn’t go as far as that, Beckett said.
The rise of self-publishing was a catastrophe, you said. It was the death of literature. Which meant the death of culture. And Garrison Keillor was right, you said: When everyone’s a writer, no one is. (Though, in fact, this was exactly the kind of statement you used to warn us to be on guard against: sounds good, but if you press on it, it falls apart.)
Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Nunez’s original lines sit well among these quotations. To wit:
She’s the kind of woman who knows fifty ways to tie a scarf was one of the first things you ever told us about her.
He is good with Apollo, but I am wary of him, the sort of man who speaks to women as if they are idiots and to older women as if they are deaf idiots.
Everyone I know is writing a book, the therapist tells me unnecessarily.
So, should you get a dog? By the end of The Friend, Apollo has immeasurably enriched the narrator’s life. But Nunez has also written a fictional biography of Virginia Woolf’s similarly enriching pet marmoset. Until I read Mitz, this newsletter is unable to make a definitive endorsement.
One thing we do know for sure: Garson O’Toole points out on Quote Investigator that if the dog is big enough to swallow you whole and you have a backlit e-reader, reading inside man’s best friend shouldn’t be a problem.
Quick quips; lightning
“I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.”
— August Strindberg
“No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.”
— Fran Lebowitz
“You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.”
— G.K. Chesterton
This concludes the 42nd issue of Get Wit Quick, your weekly pictorial guide to scarf knots. Nunez has also written a novel about a 13-year-old boy living through a global pandemic, but that seemed a bit too on the👃, you know? My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting won’t fall apart, no matter how hard you press on it. But do press on the ♥️ please.
absolutely terrific