As a Friend: A Novel [Paperback]

Forrest Gander (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2008

An unforgettable, sensual novel by "one of the most gifted and accomplished poets of his generation" (Mark Rudman).

"Heroism is a secondary virtue," Albert Camus noted, "but friendship is primary." In his gem-like first novel, Forrest Gander writes of friendship, envy, and eros as a harmonic of charged overtones. Set in a rural southern landscape as vivid as its indelible characters, As a Friend tells the story of Les, a gifted man and land surveyor, whose impact on those around him (his friend Clay, his girlfriend Sarah) provokes intense self-examination and an atmosphere of dangerous eroticism. With poetic insight, Gander explores the nature of attraction, betrayal, and loyalty. What he achieves is brilliant in style and powerfully unsettling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An adoring friendship turns deadly in poet and translator Gander's visceral if too brief first novel. Les is the magnetic, godlike protagonist of this reflective four-part narrative: introduced at the time of his difficult birth to a teenage mother, he is put up for adoption. Years later, he is observed by Clay, a colleague on his land-surveying team in a small town in Arkansas, who finds his friend's mannerisms and dissembling so compelling that he apes Les and eventually betrays him. Les, a part-time poet and practical joker, is beloved for his eccentricities, especially by his second wife, Cora, and mistress, Sarah, whose poetic remembrances of Les after his suicide make up the novel's third section and reveal hopelessly guilt-ridden Sarah to be angry, grieving for her tender, quirky lover. Gander's passionate construction of Les reveals a character deeply conflicted, comprising enormous virtue and many flaws, though in the end the work remains piecemeal and incomplete, though nicely done. (Oct.)
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Review

“An adoring friendship turns deadly in poet and translator Gander's visceral if too brief first novel.” (Publishers Weekly )

“Gander's assured command of tone…fleeting, recurring images that portend much but upon reflection explain nothing—like friendship?” (A. D. Jameson - Review of Contemporary Fiction )

“As a Friend explores the nature of attraction, betrayal and loyalty. Gander's lyrical prose often approaches poetry.” (Jay Strafford - Richmond Times-Dispatch )

“It's Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio married to Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, brought together with overtones of Faulkner.” (Lolita Lark - RALPH )

“Its length is an asset...lending the book the same mercurial qualities as its ostensible subject, the doomed, magnetic Les.” (Joyelle McSweeney - American Book Review )

“The clarity of artistic vision, formal innovation, and emotional honesty of As a Friend are enviable.” (J. T. Townley - Harvard Review )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (September 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811217450
• ISBN-13: 978-0811217453
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #443,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harvest Time, November 3, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As a Friend: A Novel (Paperback)

The other reviewer gets it right, though I would not call this a detective story it's clearly an experiment in mixing up genres and blending them together. Each of the novel's four parts has its own form, perhaps to lure you in, for they progress from the fairly traditional to the more and more difficult. I opened this book to around page 80 and nearly gave it up, convinced I wasn't even going to be able to penetrate it, but luckily common sense convinced me to start again this time from page one, and maybe that would be easier going. Sure enough, by the time I reached page 80 through this method I was on an endorphin high and I felt that the author was writing directly onto my brain.

The main character, a poet and land surveyor called Les, lives somewhere in the south, maybe Tennessee or Arkansas, where his dark and smoldering good looks make hopeless wrecks out of the men and women who can't help loving that man. Even though Les is fairly obscure someone is apparently making a documentary film of his life. It become clear that Les is living the "Captain's paradise" sort of lifestyle, he's married to one woman (Cora) while living with another (Sarah, a poet herself), but the hounds of hell lope after him as well. It's hard to write this sort of Byronic, doomed, charismatic character, and I have yet to work out exactly how Forrest Gander succeeds so splendidly, but part of it must be the choices he makes in his narrators and the focus he pays on the way they perceive not only his sensual attractions but the entire landscape and social milieu in which he dwells. In a way the book feels very private and raw, and in other ways it feels very public, because that's the double edge of the roman a clef, and AS A FRIEND is patently a novel inspired by the real life poet Frank Stanford (1948-78) and yet it isn't about Stanford entirely.

The opening scene is a graphic account of Les' birth, it is like something Steinbeck tore out of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, too vivid, too violent. Chapter two is told by Clay, Les' co-worker out in the muddy landscapes of south central Ozark country. Clay doesn't identify as gay but has to come to terms with the fact that he is finding his buddy almost terrifying attractive. His turmoil results in a shocking twist I won't spoil here but it is like a James Cain noir story of lives torn apart by a simple word spoken into the wrong woman's ear. I guess I keep thinking of 30s antecedents for Forrest Gander's novel, --maybe it's the WPA lifestyle these boys embody, in their rattletrap trucks and their smoky roadhouses and addiction to jazz music.

In part three Sarah, Les' love interest, gets to speak her mind in the months after a violent and devastating event. Not since Bessie Smith sang about those "Empty Bed Blues" have I listened to such a Biblical type of sorrow, studded with glimpses of the real and mirrored by a frightening absence.

All in all it's a fantastic book, though if Amazon is saying this volume is 192 pages they're overestimating it by 80 or 90 percent. And what about that clunker of a title? Wasn't there the editor at New Directions to take Forrest Gander out to lunch and tell him, "Änd as a friend, get a new f--ing title." But otherwise I expect you will be riveted as I was by this amazing and unexpected masterpiece.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charisma, jealousy, friendship and powerful writing, October 8, 2008

By 

Joseph R. Harris (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As a Friend: A Novel (Paperback)

It's a detective story, a love story, and an elegy, and it begins with the most amazing birth scene I've ever read. This is a slim novel, but it packs a wallop. Gorgeous writing, especially in the scenes of the land surveyors working in the woods. After what you think is the ending, there's a last (surprising) chapter that shifts the emotional register into a stirring affirmation--it's like leaving a tragic opera and hearing a late aria from the lobby and the music is somehow so high and clear and emotional, it changes the way you see everything. You step out into a transformed world. It made me think about friendship as one of life's most profound and most complex gifts.

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and sensitive writing, November 27, 2009

By 

Arthur Beck (Strasbourg, FRANCE) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: As a Friend: A Novel (Paperback)

As a French reader, it has been an amazing escape to discover Gander's way to describe, tell, make us feeling tansported by this story. I don't know very well the American litterature, but this novel is simpy fabulous. Special mention for the characters' complexity.