“What did a word like bad even mean?” That is the question at the heart of Hal Ebbott’s assured, acutely perceptive and beautifully written debut novel Among Friends.
Amos and Emerson have known each other since college. Now approaching his 52nd birthday, Emerson invites his longtime friend along with his wife Claire and 16-year-old daughter Anna to stay at his place in upstate New York for a celebratory weekend with his own wife Retsy and daughter Sophie.
It’s an initially idyllic setting: a perfect house with lawns and clay tennis court, good wine, effortlessly prepared dinners . . . it embodies the kind of ease and confidence that comes from the combination of generational wealth and having been born white and male in the late 20th-century US.
Emerson, we’re told in Ebbott’s precise, controlled prose, “dressed as one would expect. He entered clothes like opinions, with the graceful assurance of someone who has not questioned their choices.” Brought up in an emotionally stunted environment in which the right partner from the right social background was like “choosing the right rug for a room”, he has the kind of smile “that can only belong to a man: it had no sense of history; it seemed unaware of the world”.
Amos, however, is a very different type of man. For a start, he is an outsider in this world of wealth and entitlement. Despite appearances, his childhood was overwhelmed by his parents’ poverty and ill health. Even now, happily married and enjoying a successful career as a therapist, he feels on shaky ground, still surprised to have been admitted to this rarefied club and allowed to stay.
For both men, in spite of their golden present, the resentments, anger and emotional trauma of their formative years are never far away. As William Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labour in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Yet while they may seem an odd couple, Amos and Emerson have been bound together all these years by an understanding of who they each really are.
Amos is held in Emerson’s orbit: “Could Emerson be a real piece of shit? Of course. Did it matter? Of course it did not. That had always been part of him; it was bound up in the charm, the boyish flaws that made his affection so straightforward and pure.”
Emerson, meanwhile, needs Amos because, unlike the chummy bluster of the men he grew up with who still call each other by their surnames, he’s the one person who sees Emerson’s true self beneath the facade.
So, the stage is set and we’re in what feels like the patrician, male-centric world of an Updike novel. Yet Ebbott, while writing with the grace of the old masters — “trees poured along the sides of the road. The car seemed to swim through them” — subverts our expectations by exploding the calm order of things with a moment of unexpected violence.
This violation of the ingrained trust between the two families is caused by the actions of one of the men and its effects ripple outwards, testing the subtle interplay of societal and individual norms and expectations in a way that is very contemporary.
What makes Ebbott’s novel so powerful and affecting is the way in which he crafts his characters alongside the plot’s inexorable drive. Are these bad people? It’s a moot point. Certainly, each of the four friends is weak in his or her own way; each has been shaped by the circumstances of their birth and upbringing, and is bound by the scaffolding of their comfortable lives. The epigraph from Jean Renoir lays bare this truth: “The real hell of life is that everyone has their reasons.”
Ebbott’s handling of the two women, Retsy and Claire, is particularly astute. While Retsy is married to Emerson, she is in almost as weak a position as Amos; she is reliant on her status as wife and mother to maintain her comfortable existence. Meanwhile, Claire — who has known Emerson since she was a child — has a self-confidence that comes not only from her job as a doctor but her privileged upbringing.
Their relationships with their respective teenage daughters, too, harbour clues to their own perceptions of the world: while Claire can be dismissive, Retsy delivers casually cruel lessons to Sophie on how to live: “‘Anna is . . . ’ Retsy waved her hand. ‘She’s wonderful, of course. But you can choose your friends, too. It’s just that you’re so smart, and I don’t ever want to see you held back by old things.’”
When faced with a dilemma that will rupture everything, there are no easy answers for any of them, no obvious solutions to make everything OK again. There are trade-offs to make, internal deals to be struck. But the heartbreak of the novel comes in knowing that nothing will be the same again.
I’m being carefully vague. The novel’s fulcrum, its tipping point, comes a third of the way in and while you know something shattering is coming, it’s not entirely clear what.
When the moment does come, it arrives in the same way that the clarity of understanding does for a character later on: “Not as a sequence of logic, but a kind of total, pure knowledge. Like light, like the way a dropped bottle shatters outward in every direction. It’s not one shard at a time: there’s the moment when something is whole and the next when it’s not; and it isn’t just broken but everywhere.”
Ebbott’s powerful novel succeeds in letting us not only see those scattered shards in brilliant detail, but feel their impact too, like a living thing that will outlast everything else. It’s a huge achievement.
Among Friends by Hal Ebbott Picador £18.99/Riverhead Books $28, 320 pages
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