At the opening of Hal Ebbott’s debut novel, “Among Friends,” Amos, his wife Claire, and their daughter Anna go to visit Amos’s best friend Emerson, his wife Retsy, and their daughter Sophie. It’s the kind of visit that has been going on for decades, since Amos and Emerson have been pals since college (and Emerson introduced Amos to Claire, a childhood friend).
At first, the book is about Amos and Emerson’s friendship, and then it’s about what happens when one does something heinous that threatens to ruin it all. But ultimately, it’s about entitlement and privilege and the way people’s values can warp as they try to hold on to what they have. And it’s about how those without power suffer in those situations, when the truth might get buried for the sake of convenience.
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To say more would threaten to spoil the sense of suspense, even though the book is about emotions and values more than plot. And that’s in keeping with Ebbott’s ways. His online biography is scant, not to be mysterious, he says, but because he doesn’t want his life to interfere with the readers’ views of his characters. In a recent video interview, however, he did allow that, “Friendship has been in a lot of ways the bedrock of my life. I’ve relied on friendships to do much of the work that you might typically ask of a family.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You don’t specify a time frame, but there are no cell phones, laptops or social media. Why?
I find it distracting – it takes me outside the world of the scene. There was sort of no plot element that relied on such a thing. If someone chose to assume that there are phones or laptops on the tables next to the characters, that’s the reader’s prerogative. I just preferred a world that felt hermetically sealed.
Q. There’s often an edge, a sense of irritation or rivalry between Emerson and Amos, even if they often keep those thoughts to themselves. Is this a true and deep friendship, or is that internal bickering an indication of a deep rot?
It feels true to me that the roiling moments of any particular day often occur in our own heads and are no less kind of chaotic or fractious for that – a thought can be the realest thing that happens to you in a day.
There’s certainly a deep rot in their friendship, though that doesn’t preclude the idea that the friendship also has really sincere, even wonderful components. One thing that felt compelling to me is that it isn’t a question of whether it’s one or the other, but that the two coexist in relatively peaceable fashion for decades … until they don’t.
We have such a glut of literature on how to deal with a romantic breakup, but a dearth when it comes to the dissolution of friendships, which can be equally, if not more painful in some respects, because we don’t have a great language for it. We don’t have a particularly refined understanding of what the expectations are. We know sometimes that we outgrow friendships, but it just feels much more ambiguous.
Q. When Emerson confesses how his wife humiliated him, Amos, who’s a therapist and generally empathetic, makes that moment all about himself. Were you ever tempted to give your characters more grace in those moments, or are they needed for the conflict?
Maybe in a more generous or more clearheaded moment, he wouldn’t respond that way, but certainly he’s capable of having such a reaction. There are many things that make Amos a sympathetic character, but if you knew someone like him, he would sometimes be irritating. Such moments tend to hold my interest and feel more reflective of the texture of reality.
Q. Things keep going wrong – a car crash, a smashed wine bottle, a tennis injury. Were you keeping us on edge or showing what fueled the mindset of the character who ultimately transgresses violently?
The initial germ of the novel that came to me was that breaking point, the true fracture. What precedes it are the conditions under which something so horrible, and yet also in its terrifying way, plausibly quotidian, could take place. For me, there was a retroactive archeological component, calling up those fault lines that may bring feelings to the surface, so that the character lands in a place where this reaction is conceivable. For readers, I’m hoping the breaking point feels both properly shocking, but also not outside the bounds of these people on this weekend.
Q. There’s a segment of the book that focuses on one daughter and how she suffers the consequences of the adults’ behavior. It was, to me, the most powerful part of the book.
When it occurred to me, I viscerally felt sort of the importance of it. The rest of the book reflects the way the adults are or aren’t dealing with this. But that only worked if we had time to be much closer and more intimate with her; it wouldn’t be sufficient if her story was just completely subservient.
But the latter third of the novel then deliberately moves away from her. I think that having gotten a deep look at what she’s going through, it’s more wrenching to watch all of these petty, selfish machinations take place and know that somewhere else, in some other room, this girl continues to live.
Q. While there’s not much action, the latter third feels like a suspense book; it’s emotionally suspenseful as we wonder whether the adults will finally act like grown-ups. How difficult was it for you to bring yourself to the ending you landed on?
Even for me, when I read the ending, it saddens me – I still find it affecting, almost as if I hadn’t written it.
I tried writing it in a number of ways because, taking off the authorial hat, as a human being, I have a preferred outcome, too. But ultimately, none of the alternative endings rang true.
Obviously, the ending does upset people. It makes them mad. It seems to make some people hate the book itself, which is their prerogative.
But however much readers are upset, in some deeper sense, I think they’d be more upset by something that doesn’t feel authentic to the world of the book, despite the comforts it might offer on a surface level. That ending where someone comes in and does the right thing would be unjustifiable because that’s not how it happens in real life. We know this to be true. This ending only upsets me as much as reality does, which is to say considerably.
Q. At the end, the four adults each make a life-altering decision in regards to the fracturing incident. Do you imagine what they and their daughters each might think five or ten years after the book ends?
Not really. I think it feels like this is the story.
We know these things happen, both this kind of violence and the way it’s either not believed or reduced or dismissed or contextualized to the point of no longer being real. This story is an attempt to answer that in the context of these characters.
Hopefully, these characters feel real enough that readers might be inclined to wonder about where they are in a week or ten years, but that belongs to the reader and not to me.