See Friendship
Jeremy Gordon
(Harper Perennial)
In 2009, Katie Roiphe flaggeed the end of an era for the Philip Roths and John Updikes, but not (yet) of men in fiction: “[O]ur new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.” Her thesis is that that you’d think feminists would or should prefer the new set, but that “the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out.” As an example of this, she mentions a line from Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 The Corrections: “‘Denise at 32 was still beautiful.’”
Have the young literary men (if there still are any, one is compelled to say, but there still are enough of them around) evolved since Franzen’s day? The sentiment—that it is noteworthy when a woman passes 30 and is still able to catch a man’s eye—has not itself disappeared, although it is now phrased in more delicate and at least ostensibly gender-neutral terms. A line from Jeremy Gordon’s new novel See Friendship, has the narrator, 30-something Jacob Goldberg, observing the following, of Natalia, a woman he was infatuated with in high school, and with whom he has reconnected. She “looked gorgeous,” which had not been part of the plan. “Why couldn’t she just have looked slightly worse, like everyone did after hitting their thirties?”
See Friendship—the debut novel of Gordon, a senior editor for The Atlantic—is about Jacob’s quest to figure out the circumstances of the death of his high school friend Seth. He falls into this first as a way to make himself relevant at the publication he works for (they’ve gone all-in on podcasting, rendering his music writing passé), but then as a quest in its own right. He finds that not everything at his high school was as it seemed, which sounds more mysterious and exciting than it is.
The friendship circle from Jacob’s Chicago magnet high school was immediately recognizable to me as a milieu. The American coeducational public high school experience, but devoid of preppy-ness, of jocks, and sprinkled with the smart-beyond-their-years. A certain kind of urban adolescence, the punk undercurrents, the DIY hair dye, the underrepresentation of heterosexuals.
Indeed, Jacob is a kind of straight American man you don’t hear so much about these days, whose close friends are (bisexual, often) women and gay men (Seth was gay, as is the friend Jacob stays with in Los Angeles). One who’s into music and writing, who has sex (alluded to, but never depicted), but most of all, who has all these friends. He’s in therapy.
Jacob is very of his moment, attuned to micro-aggressions and such, yet in some ways a creature of another age. He prefers music to podcasts, writing to podcasts. But it’s more than a dispositional aversion to podcasting. Despite being a millennial, Jacob has a Gen Xer’s aversion to selling out, as well as a Boomer’s faith in legacy media. His dream is to work at The New Yorker.
He’s a striver, but more like something out of a 19th-century novel than one living today. He doesn’t want fame or fortune.His most immediate professional ambition—and this is very millennial—is not to lose his job. As odd as this is to say about the kind of man whose tastes tend towards burritos and weed, Jacob is a kind of bon vivant. Art for art’s sake, friendship for friendship’s sake. He’s interested in scenes and charisma. He’s a social climber, but one whose goal is to be part of a chic set, not to ascend the ranks of society more generally. The book’s best passage conveys, with precision, the mindset of people like this (for there are, in life, people like this):
“In retrospect it was clear I’d aspired to arrange my social life into a glamorous shape, or at least glamorous by the standards of a teenager who wore cargo pants and liked Weezer. I wanted to be surrounded by people who I thought were cool and smart and funny and beautiful; I succeeded through what at the time I believed were the invisible forces pulling me toward these types of people because it was meant to be, instead of what I now accepted was a sly, self-selecting impulse toward massaging my connections to find the most personally desirable friendships.”
It will be said, of adults fixated on cool bands and popularity, that these are people stuck in high school. Jacob comes across as someone aware that it is not chic to be that guy, but who is, of course, that guy. He makes regular reference to having not really stayed in touch with people from high school, but he has. He readily rejoins the old crowd, whether in his hometown of Chicago or in another major American city where pals had dispersed. Thanks to Facebook, which plays a large role in the novel, no one (well, no one on Facebook) had ever really lost touch.
It is a Facebook-generation novel, one about the moment when young people used that platform to communicate, and indeed one about the moment when it was novel to have this sort of interaction with your real-life friends. It’s not about online life as would later develop, with its myriad interactions with strangers who might be bots. The book’s title comes from a Facebook feature called “See Friendship,” which shows you your history of interactions with someone you friended on there. While a real-life reunion figures as well, Facebook means the reunion is in your pocket at all times.
Jacob’s professional pivot from music reviewer to investigative podcaster takes him from rock ‘n’ roll to high school, which is to say, from one form of sensory throwback to one’s teens to another one. At first, I thought the ethical question at the centre of the novel was whether it’s exploitative for a journalist to use the story of a friend’s death as a way of getting ahead at work. But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear (in part from snarky remarks from Jacob’s former classmates) that Jacob is using work as a pretext to reconnect with his buddies.
Buddies, but not just. There is also a tame and tender romantic interlude (Roiphe may have been onto something), in which Jacob tries and fails to reconnect with Natalia, the shockingly un-haggard girl from high school. For reasons that may speak more to my brain than to anything in the text, I picture this Natalia as looking like Natasha from Sex and the City. (Aloof, Slavic, and unattainable.)
See Friendship is above all an emo novel, in the preponderance of eyeliner, the backdrop of rock music fandom, and in the earnest feelings-sharing. It took me a while to pick up on this because I am a crucial half-decade too old to have encountered emo as a teenager. I remember the phenomenon of boys with dyed-black, gelled-down hair and not-quite-goth cosmetics, but as a thing the young people were into when I was already a young adult. A reviewer more versed in the various music scenes of the 2010s would doubtless have intuited which of the mentioned bands were real and which were fictional.
But after what was doubtless my first-ever visit to the Wikipedia page for “emo,” it all made sense. This is the artistic movement to which the novel belongs.
Like Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History, it’s about mysteries from adolescence, but these are not very mysterious mysteries. The stakes are whether a late-teens death was due to intentional or unintentional heroin overdose; the role of heroin and depression are not up for debate, but rather the precise mindset at the time, as well as the exact composition of this heroin. When it is revealed that the high school bad boy, Lee, was not merely a drug dealer but one with feelings, it squares with everything else one has read.
I feel compelled by the venue, and fixations of my own that explain my presence in this venue, to ask: is it a Jewish novel? It is a novel that tells something about the American Jewish experience, even if the something in question is that there can now be a novel whose protagonist is named Jacob Goldberg, in which Jewishness is barely even alluded to. More than halfway in, Jacob recalls visiting a Chinese restaurant on Christmas with members of his (Chinese) mother’s side of the family, and recollecting, of himself and his cousins, “we were all part Jewish.” Jacob’s father’s death, while Jacob was at college, is a key part of the story, but this presumably paternal Jewishness is not.
It’s not much of an identity novel, more about friends than family. As in The Memo, characters have different ethnic backgrounds, but this isn’t deeply explored. It’s a novel about preserving a moment in time when all that matters is your peers—and when it feels like anything is possible.
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The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
