Friendship in adulthood changes. The daily routines sustaining childhood friendships no longer exist in adulthood, and the intimacies of college and young adulthood are replaced by relationships centered on spouses and family. Friends become distant. We are living in an age of male loneliness, and so there’s something precious about friendships that survive through this metamorphosis. How many people have lifelong friendships measured in decades?
Decades long friendship serves as the premise of Hal Ebbott’s debut novel Among Friends. Amos and Emerson met in college, and their relationship is going on fifty years. Their spouses are friends, their sixteen-year-old daughters are friends, and both families have spent much of their lives together on vacations and in the day-to-day. Most importantly, Amos and Emerson rely on each other for intimate emotional support.
The novel opens with the two families enjoying a weekend away in a country house upstate. At first, the novel begins like a comedic family drama, like the recent television series, The Four Seasons, based on the 1981 film, or for a more literary reference, similar to Emma Straub’s The Vacationers, where the all the problems will be resolved with a few strong drinks and resolutions to improve themselves in the future. But this is a trick. Among Friends creates the illusion to lull us into the trap. For instance, Amos starts off with an emergency trip to the dentist and Emerson strikes a sad woman with his car. They eat rich foods and enjoy the outdoors while touching on their lives of quiet desperation. But Among Friends takes a darker turn and derails any hope of a happy ending.
The heart of the story takes place in the aftermath of the weekend. Amos and Emerson begin to question their relationships, and their wives, Claire and Retsy, face the unpleasant possibility and the unpleasant reality of those events. At first, this book builds slowly, embracing the false pretense that we’re all about to enjoy a family dramedy. But in the latter portion of the book, we’re left with page-turning chapter endings based around contemplative character interiority and the persistent question of how they will respond to the changing situation.
Although not plot driven, a major element of the story must be revealed to adequately examine the novel. There are spoilers beyond this point, though the details here matter far less than the aftermath. Consider yourself warned. At the end of their weekend away, Emerson encounters Anna, Amos’s daughter, in the laundry room, and slips his hand into her pants. She tells him to stop, and he withdraws. He then turns on the washing machine as if nothing has happened. The assault will go unreported for some time, but eventually change the outcomes of the lives of these characters indefinitely.
The novel is told through a close third-person point of view, but one that shifts between the characters on a whim. It’s a difficult choice, particularly since there are flashbacks woven into the chapters too, presenting many different viewpoints and timeframes. The flashbacks are intended to illustrate how the friendships between these adults have grown organically, woven together by purposeful events. That backstory adds to the overall richness of their relationships, but the novel is strongest in the present.
Despite the look back in time, there is a timelessness to the narrative that further obfuscates past and present. One clue comes when we flashback to Sophie and Anna’s childhood. The girls play dress up with unrolled camera film hinting to a general era, but mostly the novel remains in an ambiguous moment in time. The effect is the novel itself feels anachronistic. There’s nothing anchoring the story to the now, or the past, as though the very idea of the Chronotope has been intentionally misconfigured. The result is a weighty 20th-century style novel in tone and structure, focused on the interiority of privileged, rich men, but wrapped up in themes and content that is far more millennial in its nature.
At first this seemed like a pastiche of the 20th-century novels, a simulacrum of authors like Irving or Cheever. The further from the 20th-century, the more into focus a particular type of novel from that time has emerged, one that reflects a white, upper middle class. There are other recent examples of millennials-as-boomers with novels that have recreated this masculine energy, like Ted Thompson’s The Land of Steady Habits, and Alex Gilvarry’s Eastman Was Here. What elevates these novels beyond pastiche is a more contemporary sense of humor, a modern outlook. But Among Friends is not darkly funny—instead, the source of power here is in a willingness to engage contemporary inquiries, namely what to do when a friend commits a sexual assault.
The homoerotic friendship between Amos and Emerson embodies emotional intimacies of the contemporary middle aged men, millennial men, even if the characters themselves are older. Millennials, in our coddled feelings-focused world, are not closed off and inward facing like the suburban novelists of the 20th century. Amos and Emerson feel, and express those feelings, and share those moments with each other in a way 20th century protagonists do not.
The intimacy ends up broken when Emerson sexualizes Anna. Amos has no qualms about choosing his daughter over his friend. Anna’s agency, and her ability to shame Emerson into stopping, also draws on modern values. It does not seem foreign to a millennial mind that she should object to this molestation, and likewise, Emerson both knows he is in the wrong and also stops, two things men of the previous century often didn’t do. Although Among Friends is dolled up to look and feel like a great novel of the 20th century, the success of it derives from the dissonance between the form and the message, a modern narrative conflict made to look like an older novel.
The biggest choices here are for every character to select a side. Do they believe women? Do they believe their daughters or their friends, and what is the cost of the decision? Hal Ebbott has raised an uncomfortable reality that our closest friends may not be the safest, and forces us to confront what we might have to do. Among Friends explores an old idea in male friendship. Volumes have been written about rich white men and the way they live. The topic in so many ways has been exhausted by the heavy, 20th-century novel Ebbott clearly aspires to write. But where Ebbott finds new ground is in attaching contemporary values to the examination, packaged in a way that recalls a different time and place, a different way of thinking, and in that dichotomy, has created something new and compelling for the present.
FICTION
Among Friends
By Hal Ebbott
Riverhead Books
Published June 24, 2025
Without knowing this was written by a man, you know. Ebbott knows how to write men, not so much women, and it’s obvious.