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. https://nohu.win/ Our user-friendly platform and mobile app make it easy to place bets, track your results, and manage your account on the go.