Searching for books about friendship, it turns out, is unfriendly business. Looking past the standbys of young adult fiction (think of A Separate Peace), we find ourselves staring out at a stark landscape: the last two centuries of fiction favored exploring the loneliness of individual consciousness, not the pleasures of the BFF. Alas, the genre that yields my personal favorites, American literature, turns a cold shoulder, too: tales of rugged individualism do not accommodate bosom buddies. From Douglass to Thoreau to Hemingway, American fiction broadly asks if one can render selfhood in a hostile environment, not if one has a friend’s back. Even a Google search (you now know the depths of my desperation) offered nothing but snubs: again, authors seem to warm up to alienation, not bromance. However, after a conversation with my colleagues Walter McCloskey and Mark GwinnLandry, I was cheered to think of a few titles from our Upper School curriculum that make friendship central, bittersweet, and as complicated as it is in our lives.
Sula by Toni Morrison
This story chronicles the blood sisterhood of the young, black women Nel Wright and Sula Peace in post-World War I Ohio. Never flinching, Morrison gives us a sweet, raw friendship tested by nothing less than murder and marital infidelity, asking the question, “Is understanding a complex friendship after estrangement a cause for uplift
or sorrow?”
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
In stark contrast to Morrison, Cormac McCarthy is criticized for his inability to write the interior lives of women, but this story features the unexpectedly tender friendship of two teenagers who flee from south Texas into the beauty and brutality of 1950s Mexico. Fighting in the bowels of a prison, they find their allegiance both holds fast and falls short, exceeding our expectations of the bond between a couple of mere cowboys.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
As male bonding goes, none in American fiction is more fraught than that of Huck and Jim—a friendship that always takes our students by surprise. While this choice may seem obvious, it has to make this list for the high stakes it lends to the seminal coming-of-age story. All of Huck’s literary cousins—Scout, Holden—continue to relive his humbling moral education at the hands of Jim.
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
To step beyond American texts, we find a distinctly modern,
globalized friendship. As three lonely characters form a love triangle that re-forms through travel and shifting identities, the novel makes us question the structures and boundaries of friendships in a Facebook world. Are we indentured to lives of partial, fleeting friendships as we chat, tweet, and otherwise orbit each other at great physical distance? (And now you may take up the refrain of my students: “Happy books, Mr. Chung…why don’t we ever read happy books?”)
Sense and Sensibility by
Jane Austen
So, we end in a happy place. The sisters Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne devote themselves to each other as much as they do to their heart-wrenching marriage plots. Siblings place their own unique pressures on a friendship, and Austen’s heroines take their union to the breaking point. Yes, we know how it ends, but Austen’s account of young women against the odds thrills crowds even today (consider the dawn of the thinking girlfriend movie announced by Bridesmaids). Of course, the best books, the ones that reach us acutely, become, over the years, friends themselves.
— Tarim Chung
English Department