“All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy wrote, “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Over the years, the famous opening line to Anna Karenina has gone from being a bold generalization to a dictum. Good writers since Tolstoy seem to have taken the great Russian’s declaration as a challenge to devise interesting new ways to make fictional families unhappy. The latest to do so is a New York-based debut novelist named Hal Ebbott.
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In Among Friends: A Novel, we encounter not one family but two. Both appear happy on the surface — certainly neither family is disadvantaged, much less dysfunctional — but after a bit, Ebbott starts to sow discord. His book starts as a standard story about tight, seemingly unshakeable bonds within families and between friends. But when a brutal act creates shock waves and puts long-standing relationships to the test, the narrative changes course and the novel develops into a richer, more complex work about the lengths people go to limit damage and safeguard their charmed lives.
For almost the first half of the novel, Ebbott’s two families have clearly defined roles. Emerson, his wife Retsy, and their daughter Sophie host Amos, his wife Claire, and their daughter Anna at their country house in upstate New York. Amos and Emerson go back a long way: they met over 30 years ago in college and formed a strong friendship. Emerson and Claire go back even further, to childhood, and as a consequence, he feels not only “bound up in her history,” but attached to “the idea of what she was.”
The families get together over the course of a weekend to celebrate Emerson’s 52nd birthday. He has been looking forward to seeing his best friend again. “Time spent with Amos was like taking a damp cloth to dusty windows; in its wake the world of nuance sprang forth.” Both men badly need to join forces and unwind. Before setting out on the trip, Amos suffered a health scare and required an emergency consultation with a dentist. Emerson was left shaken after being involved in a car crash that almost killed a woman. The friends’ worries disappear when they reunite and settle into the easy rhythms and warm familiarity of one another’s company.
“It won’t rain,” Amos tells Claire. “Not on his birthday. Emerson would never allow it.” But dark clouds gather. The girls, both 16, have had a friendship foisted on them. “Who were they after all? Just people whose parents liked to hang out,” Ebbott writes. Now their differences and grievances are causing friction and driving them apart. Claire is annoyed by Anna’s behavior and one of Amos’s comments. Emerson hurts his ankle on the tennis court, and Retsy wounds his pride in bed. Gripes multiply and resentments fester. Anna looks on as adults bicker, and takes stock of their scathing words and the “cold angles of their bodies.”
Simmering tensions eventually reach a boiling point, although not in the way we expect. To disclose more would spoil a nasty surprise. Suffice it to say, Ebbott floors us with a short, queasily claustrophobic scene that expertly depicts a spontaneous outbreak of violence, including the adrenaline rush that fuels it: “The thing you imagine one feels before pulling the trigger or leaping in front of a train. Am I? Am I going to do it?”
After dropping his bombshell, Ebbott fast forwards some months to map the repercussions. The character who felt the full force of the blast is spiraling dangerously out of control. Another is waiting to be taken to task for his actions. Individuals feel pressure as they deny, harbor suspicions, or confess their secrets. One couple who share opposing views about the veracity of “this awful, unthinkable thing” struggles to find a way of dealing with it. But then one person decides unilaterally to discover what really happened, even if it confirms a betrayal and a rift between the families, becoming an unbridgeable gulf.
Ebbott’s novel is a sharp and engaging tale that asks big questions about loyalty and sacrifice in the face of a convulsive upheaval. Much of that first section is preamble — a lighting of the fuse, a counting down to disaster — but it is delineated with great skill. Ebbott displays his talent for elegant prose with his scene-setting. “It was early October,” we are told. “The summer had been defeated, the deathly chill of winter wasn’t yet at the eaves. Things seemed amenable, open. There were still good days left.”
Every day is good for the two families. Ebbott introduces them with light brushstrokes. They are cushioned by wealth. They are successful lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists. They live in rarefied, privileged worlds, and each relishes “this smooth, edgeless life.” Retsy loves her guests “not only as people but for what they seemed to mean. Because they existed, she made sense. They affirmed her bracelets, the shirts in her drawers.” Emerson’s confidence borders on arrogance: he is a man who “entered clothes like opinions, with the graceful assurance of someone who has not questioned their choices.”
As events unfold, Ebbott adds more color to his creations. Amos’s recollections relay a troubled past which may or may not have a bearing on the present. Emerson’s reflections reveal a caustic opinion of his wife: “When it came to thinking, she was like someone who tidied but never cleaned.” Yet despite their well-defined traits, movements, and mindsets, Ebbott’s characters can feel distant and therefore unknowable. This is partly due to his descriptions of people and things, which at times appear skewed, as if from straining too hard to be original. Emerson and Retsy’s house “sat waiting – like a verdict, like the last line in a book.” A woman looks at Amos, “her face calm as rules.” Retsy longs for a life that is “Regal, domestic.” Eight pages later, “regal” crops up again alongside another stark contrast: Amos watches a freighter on the river, “its motionless cargo regal, pathetic as a drunk.”
When Ebbott tones down his figurative flourishes and reins in his gnomic pronouncements (“The silence of families is never really complete. The roots speak, the breath”), his cast becomes living and breathing entities. The knock-on effect is that we get caught up in their lives and carried along by their actions. It is hard not to be appalled by one character’s deployment of ruthless power play and underhanded tactics to cover their back. Or to be gripped as a make-or-break showdown becomes inevitable. Or to be moved by someone’s anguish over the emotional fallout: “What’s broken? What’s gone? What might be lost forever?”
Among Friends isn’t a perfect novel. However, gloss over those stylistic flaws, and what we get is an absorbing family drama that ultimately explores what keeps good friendships and families intact. “Love was hard,” Claire muses. “Love was work. Love was taking time to make sure the foundation would last.” Readers can discover for themselves how carefully foundations have been constructed and how well they hold up.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.