But most of the men McCarthy meets feel they must compete and win in what Raymond, the New Mexico retreat host and one of the desert philosophers the book pursues, calls a “hyper-individualistic, compartmentalized culture.” McCarthy was moved when Tim, a Sedona journalist and fellow guru, observed that “men achieve success and move on.” “I know from my own experience that this is true,” McCarthy writes. “Life was about achievement, and most of my friendships were centered around work. Once those work goals were realized, the relationships…tended to fade.”
McCarthy at one point suggests that his male friendships offer a very different kind of support than his marriage—not because of their non-sexual nature, but because he and his boyfriends are mutually burdened with debt. “I am so often concerned…providing for my family, securing the future for my children,” he writes. “I really feel the weight of responsibility.” Part of him suspects that only men can truly relate to these pressures (though he wonders if it’s “just old-school male indoctrination and sexism”). Men crave friends who can help them cope with performance anxiety or even failure and shame (none of which women can understand), but they also recoil at the thought of other men witnessing such vulnerability. It’s a paradox that pits the exemplars in McCarthy’s book between the camaraderie of a pub and the safety of a workplace, office or games console.
“Who Needs Friends” exposes the shortcomings of the lone-brother ballad genre: the reliance on stock figures, the flavor of stilts, the monochromatic emotional palette streaked with cruelty. (McCarthy has a habit of associating the ailing body politic with the “big”, “chubby”, “fat” and “big” physiques of his interlocutors.) If the commentary on female bonding that flourished in the mid-twenties seemed to be part of certain dull stereotypes – bossy, passive aggressive, fickle – then the discourse of male friendship is constrained and prim, lacking in vocabulary reserve for describing the inner life of its subjects.
The picture of friendship that emerges from books like McCarthy’s can seem romanticized and fragile. Fiction is able to more freely explore the threads of self-interest and conflict that permeate the social world of people. Jeremy Gordon’s novel Seeing Friendship (Harper Perennial), released last year, provides a nuanced and honest look at how platonic male bonds form and break. Its protagonist, Jacob, is a culture journalist in his mid-thirties who, like McCarthy, feels he has lost his way on the path of friendship. The men he knows are usually colleagues whom he views as networking opportunities rather than soulmates. When his bosses insist that he start a long-form podcast, he decides to tell the story of an old friend named Seth who died a few years after graduating from high school. In part, it’s a clever exercise in self-promotion, a way to show off oneself as smart and thoughtful, a good opportunity for listeners. But it’s also motivated by real nostalgia: Seth “was a membrane,” Jacob recalls. “He let everything and everyone pass.” Seth exuded a warm, “inviting aura” that enveloped the entire class. Through his exploration of Seth, Jacob attempts to restore or develop a purer form of relationship.
Unsurprisingly, his efforts backfire. At the end of the novel, Jacob is forced to admit that the ideal friend as a construct does not exist. Gordon’s novel, in addition to its realism about what people can and cannot get from each other, offers a biting satire of the parasocial friendship ecosystem of podcasts and social media. Working on his audio project makes Jacob more narcissistic and less socially competent; the podcast distorts his understanding of what friends are for. Seth becomes involved in Jacob’s self-creation project, which is also an attempt to connect with listeners he will likely never meet. Gordon suggests that in the parasocial world, connections are rooted in superficial identification rather than stronger bonds, and friendship becomes a desired activity through which you achieve a desired identity.
What do we want from our friends? For most of history, “men were the great experts in friendship,” writes scholar Tiffany Watt Smith in Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship (Celadon), a sensitive and thorough study of changing views on communication and gender. She describes how, in the fourth century BC, Aristotle proposed a three-level model of friendship, in which the bonds of “utility” and “pleasure” were the bottom two levels. It was believed that women – themselves superficial, fickle, competitive – were capable of such business or frivolous relationships. Men, however, could also form friendships characterized by “a complete fusion and commingling of minds” that oriented them towards the greater good. The 17th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote of his affection for his contemporary Etienne de La Boétie: “If you ask me to say why I loved him, I feel it is impossible to express it except by answering: ‘Because it was he: because it was I.’ »