Although there is no question mark in the title, Simone Weil is quoted as saying that is what one should ask one’s neighbor, rather than “how are you?”, as it implies true sympathy and love. The unnamed narrator’s friend, also unnamed, are both going through a lot. Her friend’s cancer has returned and is terminal. Rather than await the inevitable messy, painful end, she has decided to end her life on her own terms and on her own timetable. She asks the narrator to accompany her to a beautiful guest house in the northeast to share her final days and be the one who “finds” her and notifies others. Like Nunez’s earlier award-winning novel, The friend, large questions about life, death, difficult relationships, even whether to have children in the face of inexorably advancing climate change, dominate the book. Like the earlier book, both women are writers and there is a very literary quality to the narrative. The reader inevitably equates a lot of what is written to Nunez’s own philosophy of life and writing, as well as suspecting strongly that this friend is based on the author’s own connection to Susan Sontag, about whom she wrote Sempre Susan. It’s rather self-involved and navel-gazing. It was much less engaging, to me, than The friend, although it considers so many similar themes. I missed Apollo, the giant, mournful, and also dying, Great Dane from the earlier novel, which, oddly, made it a more human book than this one. 210 pp.
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