All seems perfect for these rich and successful New Yorkers – until a bond is violently shattered in this sharp and pleasurable debut
A
mos and Emerson are the best of friends; everyone knows this. They are a model of male intimacy and understanding: confiding in each other, trusting each other, hugging each other (“real, loving hugs, clutches without irony”). Theirs is truly a friendship for the ages.
Or so it seems. For on the weekend of Emerson’s 52nd birthday, an occasion at the centre of Hal Ebbott’s probing and insightful debut novel, something happens that changes everything – and raises the question of whether we can ever truly know anyone.
Amos and Emerson met on the first day of college and bonded immediately despite their surface differences (Emerson is rich and handsome, Amos poor but clever). They have each fallen in love, married and had children, their families going through life together, twinned by the two men’s unbreakable bond. “You know,” observes Amos’s wife, Claire, “it’s a triumph of my marriage that I don’t envy what the two of you have.”
