SEE FRIENDSHIP, by Jeremy Gordon
In the decade since the hit show “Serial” turned the name “Adnan” into a dinner-party mononym, a new protagonist archetype has emerged: the podcaster. Often these narrators play amateur detectives pursuing true-crime cases involving violence against young women (“I Have Some Questions for You,” by Rebecca Makkai, and “Sadie,” by Courtney Summers). Other times, the narrator’s pulled into manosphere buffoonery (“Friend of the Pod,” by Sam Lipsyte). Now we have Jeremy Gordon’s debut novel, “See Friendship,” whose reluctant podcaster is adrift and full of anxiety.
The novel is at heart a millennial’s take on grief-inflected nostalgia. It follows Jacob Goldberg, a 31-year-old Jewish-Chinese journalist working at a “moderately respected” culture website. He’s spent a decade churning out essays on exhibitions at the Whitney and pop icons’ surprise albums. For his next venture for the publication, Jacob pitches a podcast series about a close high school friend, Seth, who died unexpectedly the year after Jacob graduated.
Seth was the Jay Gatsby to Jacob’s Nick Carraway. “There wasn’t a single person at our high school he didn’t get along with, and he could expand this invitational aura to include anyone,” Jacob recalls. Seth was also Black-Brazilian and gay; he and Jacob bonded as two biracial students at the predominantly white Gale Sayers Prep, just outside Chicago (one of the most segregated cities in the United States).
As much as Jacob loved Seth, the podcast is not a passion project. Jacob sees job security in pivoting to the ad-friendly audio format, and though he knows that one dead friend is a tough anchor to sustain an entire series, he figures he can pad out the episodes with 9/11, the George W. Bush administration and other aughts-era signifiers. Despite his boss’s ambivalent response, Jacob proceeds apace, collecting the details he thinks he’ll need to produce a show.
We might pause here. Reading about someone else’s podcast research is on par with a friend sharing last night’s dream: If we’re not in it, don’t bother. But “See Friendship” holds our interest by sending Jacob on a spree of interviews with his former classmates, in Chicago and Los Angeles, that revises his memories of his late friend’s final months. He documents romantic fumblings, overambitious theater productions and a skirmish at Seth’s funeral. He also hooks us with a plot twist: It turns out Seth didn’t die from a vague stomach condition, as Jacob believed, but from a heroin overdose. And a much-despised local musician named Lee Finch is somehow responsible. Jacob decides confronting Lee will provide a satisfying climax for the podcast and long-awaited closure for himself.
It would all make for a tidy story (for both podcast and novel), but Gordon — who is an editor at The Atlantic, with bylines at Pitchfork, GQ and The New York Times Magazine — rejects tidiness. Jacob isn’t a terribly good journalist. He misses obvious clues and ignores the smoking gun of a related school scandal. The novel opens with Jacob’s job anxieties, but even those fade into the background. And while another novelist might stress Jacob’s Jewish-Chinese identity, Gordon only lightly touches it.
His real interest is the millennial in crisis — cue the Strokes’ “Is This It” — and the ways Jacob glances backward. If every generation thinks it invented sex, Gordon’s insight is that, thanks to technology, every generation does reinvent nostalgia. That’s hinted at with the book’s title: “See Friendship” is also the name of the Facebook tool for isolating the digital exchanges between oneself and a friend. It’s a fitting metaphor. Facebook’s feature delivers a seemingly complete record, but like all portraits, it’s still partial. Jacob looks, he learns, but something will always elude him.
As the novel progresses, the true source of Jacob’s renewed obsession with Seth comes to light. Jacob has recently suffered a mental breakdown. He’s now floating along, unmoored. Seth is part of a larger siren’s call toward the past — Jacob hopes that by dwelling in memory, he might find a way out of his present.
The self-sabotaging fixation on nostalgia reminded me of “High Fidelity,” Nick Hornby’s Gen X cri de coeur. Hornby’s narrator, Rob, looked to the past for evidence; Gordon’s proffers revisions and palimpsests. “In searching for the answer, all I’d found were the limitations of my ability to understand,” Jacob says.
It isn’t a spoiler to reveal that the novel resists traditional resolution. The podcast’s success is ultimately a secondary concern; Jacob never “rediscovers” Seth in the way he initially set out to; and “See Friendship” rejects catharsis in favor of the diffuse grays of extended mourning. Jacob, per Dickinson, will “go on aching still/Through Centuries of Nerve.”
The final chapter decenters Jacob in order to unfold outward — wonderfully so, like its own small metaphor of the internet. Gordon’s smart novel on the warping effects of nostalgia and technology asks us to follow some Forsterian advice from a century ago: Only connect.
SEE FRIENDSHIP | By Jeremy Gordon | Harper Perennial | 280 pp. | Paperback, $17.99