While seemingly nonlinear, going off on tangential riffs about the literary world, the animal world, difficult students, books as “mirrors,” the lives of artists, the nature of suicide, and so on, this novel has a deliberate chronology, much like the journey of a flâneur (one of the topics on which she digresses), starting over here and ending over there, thinking and observing along the way. The novel’s voice is discursive, and its events take place in the narrator’s mind more than in her actions. In the opening pages, we are introduced to the novel’s central absence, a colleague of the first-person writer-narrator who has recently ended his life, leaving behind a large dog called Apollo, which the narrator takes into her care. As veiled first person, “you” is a being one cannot escape.īut what about an “I” whose “you” is absent-and sorely missed? Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) offers another approach to the use of “you”: direct address as a focal point for monologue.

“I” and “you” have trouble coexisting, because they are the same person, and because they each see flaws in the other. As veiled first person, “you” is tied up with the ego or with troubles in a character’s relationship with herself. In Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the second person has an accusatory feel, as it narrates the self-destruction of its protagonist and implicates the reader at the same time. In Lorrie Moore’s Self Help, for example, the second person is cast in the imperative, taking the form of flawed instruction, crafting a warm-humored, self-deprecating parody of popular texts that purport to make living easier. The pronoun “you” has often been used in fiction as a veiled first person, foregrounding a main character’s insecurity by putting the self at arm’s length. Or “you” could be specific to one of the story’s characters. “You” could be a single person, or many people, or could change over the course of a story. When I encounter direct address in fiction, my first assumption is that the “you” is me-that the narrator uses the second person to create kinship with the “dear reader.” But on a deeper look, the second person has more potential for complexity.

Sigrid nunez the friend summary