Seven novels that explore the complexity of friendship

Jeremy Gordon's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Pitchfork, The Atlantic, and GQ. He was born in Chicago, and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jen.

See Friendship is his first novel.

At Lit Hub Gordon tagged "seven novels that explore friendship in all its messy, complex beauty." One title on the list:

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

One cannot be too critical of “the scene”; it’s just unbecoming. While it may produce a sense of FOMO to see groups of young, beautiful, and potentially talented people palling about together, the arts are so culturally diminished across global society that you can’t fault any group of like-minded individuals for falling in with each other. Proximity to minor success is no guarantee of lasting value, anyway, and what seems like the most important thing at the start of The Savage Detectives—the mid-70s Latin American experimental poetry scene—quickly becomes irrelevant as the years go on. Bolaño is unsentimental about what happens to the writers of this world: some die, some disappear, some quit, some sputter out. Nobody becomes famous, nobody produces work of evergreen merit.

But the flip side is that Bolaño was fictionalizing the real poets of his mid-70s Latin American experimental poetry scene, essentially immortalizing them all as charming failures in a novel that now regularly makes its way onto “best ever” lists. I have never read a poem by Vera or Mara Larrosa, but their fictional analogues, the Font sisters, are etched in my memory forever—and if literature may be considered as an act of preservation, I do find it kind of beautiful and meaningful that Bolaño froze his friends on the page and turned them into minor legends. Sorry to be a little sentimental about it.

Read about another novel on the list.

The Savage Detectives appears among Joanna Kavenna's top ten absurd quests in fiction, Tim Lewis's top ten stoners from the arts and entertainment, Sam Munson's six best stoner novels, and Benjamin Obler's top ten fictional coffee scenes; it is one of Edmund White's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue