The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

 One review I read of this book was entitled "Melancholy Dane", which made me smile, because while the dog in the book does have the countenance of a grieving Hamlet, he lacks other important features of the tragic hero.
On the surface, this is a book about a writer whose best friend has committed suicide, who takes the friend’s now ownerless and abandoned Great Dane into her teeny tiny New York City apartment.  There is also some aspect of owners who do not take responsibility for their pets, as the now deceased writer, who died by their own hand, left the dog to the narrator without once asking her about it, and in fact it is somewhat of a burden.  Not only does she not have a lot of dog ownership in her past, she lives in a building where pets are forbidden and she is on the brink of losing her apartment, which she can ill afford to do, when she happens upon a solution that works.
It is underneath all that a book about grief.  The struggle to come to terms with loss, which the narrator and the dog share in equal parts, and then to move on--which the dog does not but the narrator manages to live with the new normal, is the take home message for me.  The Great Dane is a difficult to overlook manifestation of the catastrophe, which the narrators friends fail to see the significance of but the reader cannot overlook it.