male friendship, the way it works, the way people think about it, is going through a generational change. to feel the change you just have to watch old movies. Last week, I had my kids sit down to dinner, which I always thought was one of my favorite movies. It is about a group of 20-somethings in Baltimore in 1959, struggling to take the next step toward adulthood. they discuss football and sandwiches, about presley and sinatra… but i had forgotten how much they also talk about sex. one of them bets that he can “fight” a girl on a second date, another tells stories about the first time she “matched”. part of the point, of course, is that all this sexism gets in the way of their lives. They don’t really know what to talk about with the women, but the film is also clearly nostalgic for their late-night bullfighting sessions at the restaurant. all of which make male friendship, and the way it mixes guilt and innocence, an interesting thing to write about.
one of the strangest weekends of my life was when i flew to barcelona to interview lebron james. after waiting for two days, I was finally ushered into the large hotel room where he was speaking to the media. It turned out that our interview was going to have an audience, including not only agents, publicists, and Nike reps, but also some of LeBron’s former high school teammates who were now part of his entourage. He kept asking me what it would be like to be one of those guys whose entire life had been shaped by someone he just happened to play basketball with 10 years earlier.
Just like the guys at the diner, were they caught up in a dynamic that really only made sense in high school? A few years later I started writing The Sidekick, about the complicated relationship between a sports reporter and an NBA player who grew up together. the reporter sees him change over time, from the boy he used to ride the bus with to someone who flies in his own private jet. One of the things I realized while writing the book is that friendship plots serve as a foil for all other plots, in the same way that our friends’ successes give us something to compare our own to. it’s hard not to wonder after a while: what is the difference between us that makes our lives so different? I thought we were friends, I thought we were basically the same…
You are reading: Books about male friendship
here is a list of 10 great stories about friendship between men, with all its problems and consolations.
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1. the three musketeers by alexandre dumas this was my favorite novel as a child. i have never forgotten the terrible scene at the end when the four friends execute the treacherous milady, ex-wife of athos and ex-lover of d’artagnan. looking at that scene now, I’m amazed at how it reads today: a gang of men got together to punish a woman, in part because of her power to “seduce” them. but dumas admiration for milady can also be heard, as she manages to break free of her bonds and nearly escape down the grassy slope by the river…
2. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens This is a book about many things, but male friendship is certainly one of them until romantic plots and Bildungsroman take over. “Think of me in my prime,” Steerforth says, a few nights before he leaves with Copperfield’s childhood sweetheart, Little Em’ly. dealing with the feeling of betrayal is part of what makes him grow.
3. brideshead revisited by evelyn waugha reminder that you not only fall in love with people but also with the worlds they come from. At various points, Charles Ryder has to choose between Sebastian and his family, and even marries his best friend’s sister, but you always get the feeling that their friendship runs deeper than all the other stories that come out of it. /p>
4. the sun also rises by ernest hemingway is not the happiest image of male bonding. Robert Cohn punches Jake Barnes over a woman, when in reality all the guys were supposed to go fishing together. And yet, when they go fishing, you feel their closeness: bill and jake compete for the daily catch, but in a friendly way, and the words pick up and joke between them – “let’s use the product of the vine” – until the outside world, with its more complicated relationships, draws them back.
5. Graham Greene’s Third Man is Em Forster’s Question: If you had to choose between betraying your country and betraying your friend, which would you choose? And what if “your country” in this case means hospitals full of sick children made even sicker by the diluted penicillin your old schoolmate has been selling on the black market? one of those stories in which the lover is more faithful than the friend.
6. on the road by jack kerouac beat writer sal paradise drives across america with his crazy old friend dean moriarty, getting drunk, having sex, seeing the sights. There is much in the novel that is dated, including Dean’s treatment of women. sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s supposed to be the hero or the butt of the joke. but the book is also a reminder of what it was like to want to talk so much, to argue about the world, and to think of “experience” as what would help you resolve those arguments.
7. lone dove by larry mcmurtry about the last days of the american west. The heroes are two Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, and their friendship is at the center of the story. what unites them is part shared competence and part shared code. although the two men are very different from each other, they trust and make use of those differences in a way that is as intimate as a conversation. When Gus dies, Woodrow’s world becomes a less interesting place to succeed.
8. sagharbour by colson whiteheadthe title comes from the beachfront neighborhood on long island where african americans settled after the war. is a coming of age story for a group of teenagers, whose friendship is a form of competition. forces them to craft a version of their identities that can pass the test of constant teasing: “Over time, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways.”
9. 1939 by peter taylor perhaps my favorite story. Two students drive from Kenyon College to meet their fiancées in New York. young people want to be writers and care more about their future than their friendship. but things are not going well for them in the city. the car breaks down, their girlfriends leave them. on the train ride back to ohio they fight. eventually the fight breaks up and in the end they’re just a couple of friends going back to college who still don’t have the rest of their lives to face.
10. three men in a boat by jerome k jerome one of the reasons friendship is hard to write about is that the best friendships are often non-dramatic: people get along and have fun. even if they get on your nerves, it doesn’t really matter because you can always make fun of them for it. this is one of the first books i read in lockdown, and my son used to listen to the martin jarvis recording on repeat. comfort food, but it’s also pretty close to an ordinary friendship.
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