Two middle-aged men navigate the wreck of their friendship after a shocking betrayal in Hal Ebbott’s sensitive and sharply observed debut novel.

At first, the two central characters in AMONG FRIENDS seem to have been plucked straight from a John Cheever story. Comfortable and content with their lives and their choices --- or so it appears --- Amos and Emerson are the kind of men other people envy. They have attractive wives and well-behaved children. Their homes serve as refuge from the cruel outside world. But there’s turmoil beneath this placid surface, thanks to a lifetime of festering fears, unsaid truths and emotional wounds.

The trouble emerges during a weekend celebration to mark Emerson’s 52nd birthday. He and Amos have been friends since college, where they met as freshman-year roommates. Ebbott’s description of their first encounter during a casual football game sums up the dynamic that still rules their relationship. The moneyed Emerson moves “with the lazy grace of a prodigy, natural and untended.” Amos, who comes from a troubled and dysfunctional family, is “ashamed of his effort” and overly conscious of his “needful and unsightly” sweating.

"...[a] sensitive and sharply observed debut novel.... The decisions [the characters] make might be heartbreaking or infuriating, but in Ebbott’s capable hands, they feel blisteringly real."

As an adult, Amos appears to have shed that late-adolescent awkwardness. But in his heart he still feels that he’s “only a guest” in his own, successful life. Meanwhile, Emerson continues to move through the world “as though it were a restaurant: a place to order, eat, and then leave.” He’s seemingly unaware of both his immense privilege and his capacity for casual cruelty. (His wife, the shrinking and anorexic Retsy, and his daughter, Sophie, are all too familiar with his barbs.)

Amos spends the weekend at Emerson’s home, along with his wife, Claire --- a doctor and his childhood friend --- and their teenage daughter, Anna. But when one of the adults does something unforgivable, the consequences of the act ripple outward, forcing all of Ebbott’s carefully drawn characters to reconsider their relationships with each other and themselves. How will they respond when confronted with an uncomfortable truth? (The book makes it clear that a crime has occurred, even as several characters insist in believing it has not.) Their various reactions --- the mental games they play in order to sidestep acknowledging or addressing a reality that would shatter their gilded existence --- are at the core of AMONG FRIENDS.

Ebbott deftly demonstrates how, in just a few quick turns, someone can convince themselves that the narrative that serves them best is true. “What if he truly had done it?” one character wonders. “In that case, it went without saying…. She would cast him out.” But accepting that truth “wasn’t so much slippery as too big to hold…what it would mean was too much. Like trying to strip a painting of only pigment, or imagine a house without the load-bearing wall.” It is more convenient to deny an all-too-obvious reality.

The problem of how to respond to a wrong is particularly acute for Amos, who must ask himself what he is willing to give up in order to do what he knows to be right. Will he risk his marriage to Claire, whose family wealth has allowed him to avoid the financial struggles of his parents and pursue a fulfilling career as a therapist? Thanks to her, he doesn’t live a life where “the stairs of his apartment [are] trimmed with rubber. And Amos knew he hadn’t the strength for that… How to untangle love from the promise of life in which certain things would be so much easier?”

And then there’s Amos’ friendship with Emerson, which is the defining relationship of his adult life. Emerson held out a hand and lifted Amos up, inviting him into a world of ease and affluence. “To be close to Emerson was to edge toward the source of some greatness --- a currency, a kind of raw power the world understood,” he thinks. But this is not a one-sided exchange. For Emerson, who is secretly weak and insecure, the approval of the smarter and world-battered Amos gives him gravitas by association: “This, too, was the gift Amos had given: to make him feel like he had some substance, some core. Didn’t it vouch for him, being friends with someone possessed of such brutal intellect, whose life had been formed amid a turmoil of poverty and neglect?”

In the end, all the characters in AMONG FRIENDS are faced with a choice. They can accept a painful truth and try to move forward, or they can weave fragile justifications that permit them to carry on as before. The decisions they make might be heartbreaking or infuriating, but in Ebbott’s capable hands, they feel blisteringly real.