That's not really possible anymore - not the way it once was. He had a life as a very successful womanizer. One of them is getting older and losing certain powers. But there are many things that are troubling him. NUNEZ: Well - I, you know, he doesn't leave a note, so we can't say exactly why he takes his life. SIMON: Not a character for these times, is he? And even at the end of the novel, I'm not sure why he took his life because you actually think a jealous husband would have caught up with him first. SIMON: Let me ask you about the writer who died. 1, she is observed walking this horse of a dog in front of the building and has an inauthentic explanation to the custodian as to why she's doing it. NUNEZ: So that's an even more important issue. But also it's a place where in the lease, it is specified that no dogs are allowed. And so the narrator - actually, it's a 500-square-foot apartment. And it becomes clear that no one else is going to take this dog. NUNEZ: Well, she does try to say that, and wife three will not accept that. And why doesn't the narrator say, come on now, I live in a, you know, 200-square-foot apartment, I can't do this? SIMON: Apollo is a gift, although, at first, he doesn't appear to be so, from wife No.

And Sigrid Nunez, who's taught at Princeton, Amherst, The New School and other universities and is the author of eight acclaimed novels, joins us from New York. 'The Friend' just won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. 'The Friend,' by Sigrid Nunez, is a taut, tight, lyrical little novel on the enormous questions of love, loss and art and even the question of how to love an enormous dog - in this case, a Great Dane named Apollo who the unnamed narrator takes into her meager Manhattan apartment following the suicide of his master who was her former, teacher, mentor, lover and friend.

The friend sigrid nunez