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<\/p>\n\u201cWhat did a word like bad even mean?\u201d That is the question at the heart of Hal Ebbott\u2019s assured, acutely perceptive and beautifully written debut novel Among Friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an initially idyllic setting: a perfect house with lawns and clay tennis court, good wine, effortlessly prepared dinners\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009it 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.<\/p>\n
Emerson, we\u2019re told in Ebbott\u2019s precise, controlled prose, \u201cdressed as one would expect. He entered clothes like opinions, with the graceful assurance of someone who has not questioned their choices.\u201d Brought up in an emotionally stunted environment in which the right partner from the right social background was like \u201cchoosing the right rug for a room\u201d, he has the kind of smile \u201cthat can only belong to a man: it had no sense of history; it seemed unaware of the world\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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: \u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s 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.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Amos is held in Emerson\u2019s orbit: \u201cCould 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the one person who sees Emerson\u2019s true self beneath the facade.<\/p>\n
So, the stage is set and we\u2019re in what feels like the patrician, male-centric world of an Updike novel. Yet Ebbott, while writing with the grace of the old masters \u2014 \u201ctrees poured along the sides of the road. The car seemed to swim through them\u201d \u2014 subverts our expectations by exploding the calm order of things with a moment of unexpected violence. <\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What makes Ebbott\u2019s novel so powerful and affecting is the way in which he crafts his characters alongside the plot\u2019s inexorable drive. Are these bad people? It\u2019s 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: \u201cThe real hell of life is that everyone has their reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nWhat makes Ebbott\u2019s novel so powerful is the way in which he crafts his characters alongside the plot\u2019s inexorable drive. Are these bad people? It\u2019s a moot point<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Ebbott\u2019s 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 \u2014 who has known Emerson since she was a child \u2014 has a self-confidence that comes not only from her job as a doctor but her privileged upbringing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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: \u201c\u2018Anna is\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009\u2019 Retsy waved her hand. \u2018She\u2019s wonderful, of course. But you can choose your friends, too. It\u2019s just that you\u2019re so smart, and I don\u2019t ever want to see you held back by old things.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m being carefully vague. The novel\u2019s fulcrum, its tipping point, comes a third of the way in and while you know something shattering is coming, it\u2019s not entirely clear what.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When the moment does come, it arrives in the same way that the clarity of understanding does for a character later on: \u201cNot 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\u2019s not one shard at a time: there\u2019s the moment when something is whole and the next when it\u2019s not; and it isn\u2019t just broken but everywhere.\u201d <\/p>\n
Ebbott\u2019s 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\u2019s a huge achievement.<\/p>\n
Among Friends<\/strong> by Hal Ebbott Picador \u00a318.99\/Riverhead Books $28, 320 pages<\/p>\n
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