Studies in American Fiction

How can a human being enter into a narrative world and not disrupt the distribution of attention?

Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003)

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018) tells the story of a writer (our narrator) grieving her fellow writer-friend (and one-time lover), who died by suicide. Compounding her grief is the fact that her friend’s death feels utterly foreseeable, as he lived with depression and frequently shared his suicidal thoughts with others. The narrator laments, “I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn’t do.”¹ Further, the now “dead white male” (8), as the narrator refers to him, brashly and openly expressed his discontent with shifting cultural norms; unable to take responsibility for his own abusive behavior and privilege, he outspokenly proclaimed himself a victim. Partially because the suicide confirmed what the narrator always already intuited, she refrains from treating her friend’s death as a puzzle or mystery; she does not try to figure out why he did “it” and thereby rejects a pervasive trope within suicide narratives.

Throughout the novel, the narrator regards grief, depression, and, most especially for my purposes, trauma not as ineffable, self-defining experiences that involve extensive confession or that call for significant interpretive labor, but as shared, available, everyday realities.² Repeatedly, the novel gestures toward the conventional narrative trajectories [End Page 119] of these painful emotions that, though distinct, are united by their narrative function, as they commonly generate (or stand in for) characterological depth through which an explanatory backstory is gradually revealed. Yet The Friend draws readers’ attention to this narrative potential only to discard it; the “trauma plot,” for example, which would “present[] us with locks and keys”—a mysterious character who subsequently offers a traumatic revelation—is considered but ultimately rejected.³ In its place, the novel foregrounds immanence and accessibility; what would otherwise be at the heart of the “trauma plot” is in this novel an open secret.

The novel’s style of narration is highly reticent—a style that some might condemn as enabling and cowardly but that others might regard as utterly sufficient, in line with what the situation invites. The passivity with which the narrator renders harm is best understood in the context of the “open secret” as Anne-Lise François defines the term. For François, the open secret functions as a “revelation that one is free to take for granted” or a “way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.”⁴ With an open secret, then, nothing seems to change once one becomes aware of it, except that one understands how the open secret could inspire action, even as it also inhibits this possibility. The narrator presents the friend’s suicide as an open secret right from the start; because the friend casually tells everyone about his suicide plans, his disclosure amounts to a “self-canceling revelation” that “permits a release from the ethical imperative to act upon knowledge.”⁵ According to the novel, it is as though he has not spoken at all, for everyone feels released from the duty to act. It is not just that his plans are obvious but also that in their transparency, they lose meaning for the public.

Within trauma studies, critics have long argued that chronic, banal, everyday microtrauma experienced by marginalized constituents—people of color, women, disabled individuals, LGBTQ+ populations—is undertheorized by dominant trauma paradigms, most especially psychoanalytic-deconstructive trauma theory.⁶ Undergirding this erasure is trauma theory’s emphasis on the singular, extraordinary experience, linked to its emergence from Holocaust studies. Because trauma theory conceptualizes trauma as an exceptional, unrepresentable event outside everyday experience, it cannot account for the friend’s depression and the predictability—the banality—of his death.⁷ Furthermore, defining trauma as exceptional positions pain as a problem for representation and has been taken to buttress a far-reaching consensus that pain...