‘Among Friends’ captures the joy and danger of intimacy
Men: Think of your closest friend, the person who knows you best, with whom you feel the most comfortable. Your pal, your bud, your homie. What is the basis of your friendship? What would it take to rupture the years of trust and confidence between you? What would you be willing to forgive in order to maintain that relationship? Is there a circumstance in which you might choose your friend over a member of your own family? These are the questions at the heart of Hal Ebbott’s stylish and assured debut novel. Arriving at a moment when there is a widely discussed crisis in male friendship, “Among Friends” is a timely book, placing such a relationship at the center of its narrative.
The friends in question are Amos and Emerson, two men in their early 50s from very different backgrounds who met as college roommates. While Amos, a therapist, had “no family” and emerged from “a turmoil of poverty and neglect,” Emerson, a lawyer, is a child of privilege: “handsome and rich; arrogant, charming, and tall.” Each fulfills something for the other. For Emerson, the development of their friendship was like “being caught off guard by music,” leaving him “blindsided by poignant gratitude.” For Amos, accustomed to abandonment, Emerson is not only someone who reliably shows up to support him, but also offers a path toward upward mobility. “Friendship is a ladder,” Amos thinks. “It is something you climb; it’s two hands knit together to let you see over the fence.”
Further binding the two men is the fact that Amos marries Emerson’s childhood friend, Claire, a physician whose family’s wealth provides them with a “smooth, edgeless life.” Emerson’s wife, Retsy (short for Retsina), meanwhile, is status-driven and obsessed with being thin, content to be “a caricature.” She sees their marriage as “clear-eyed” and having “the feeling of a prudent arrangement.” Both couples have teen daughters who are entering “the age when you could feel a man’s gaze on the subway and know precisely what went through his head.” Such thoughts – and the actions they might inspire – will ultimately test the friendship between Amos and Emerson.
Ebbott’s prose is honed and aphoristic, recalling the work of James Salter and John Cheever, writers who also chronicled the lives of moneyed New Yorkers. “He entered clothes like opinions, with the graceful assurance of someone who has not questioned their choices,” Ebbott writes of Emerson. The authorial stance is confident, and, at times, self-consciously showy. The exact time frame of the story is not signposted. There is no mention of the internet or cellphones, for example. The sentences go down easy, like a cold gin and tonic on a hot day. The point of view glides from one character to another, backward and forward in time, but there is substance beneath the gleaming surfaces. Indeed, the book is partly about reckoning with the ugly truths that can be found under the gilded carapace of affluence and esteem.
The novel’s first half describes a weekend visit by Amos and family to Emerson’s country home. Though it is a destination with many happy memories for both families, there is a series of omens suggesting that this visit will be different. Amos wakes up with a swelling in his jaw, convinced that he is dying. Meanwhile, Emerson gets into an accident, hitting a woman with his car. The next morning, he injures his leg playing tennis with Amos, leaving him hobbled for the weekend and dependent on others, a situation he abhors. All of this foreshadows an ugly incident between Emerson and Amos’s daughter, Anna. The remainder of the book unpacks the aftermath of that interaction for each of the main characters. We see Anna’s traumatic introspection and Emerson’s deluded justifications, but the plot hinges on whether Amos and Claire will believe Anna’s accusations against their old friend and act on them.
That decision is particularly fraught for Amos. Because Claire and Emerson are so close, he risks not only losing his dearest friend but also causing irreparable damage to his marriage and the privileged lifestyle that comes with it. In the end, Amos must decide whether to buy into a limited, transactional idea of friendship or live with the consequences of opting out.
Though its timeless, patrician milieu may feel remote to some readers, what Ebbott captures so well is the ever-present risk we take in making connections with others: the risk that our vulnerabilities might be used against us, or worse, that in our desire for friendship and closeness we might overlook the truth about ourselves or someone else only to have it painfully revealed later on. As Ebbott writes, “You never knew when the light might change, when someone might shift, and you’d discover the angle that opened everything up.”
Jon Michaud is a writer and librarian. His latest book is “Last Call at Coogan’s: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar.”