The book puts a stake in an intelligent position that seems well suited for the millennial generation—that social media has only served to detach us from true friendships, substituting the commodity of surface connection for the vulnerability of actual intimacy. Additionally, it maps out relationships in a literal timeline, allowing us to retrace them, but also leaving so little separation from our pasts that it challenges emotional growth.

Gordon has given us a narrator that we can trust to probe this subject with sensitivity even as his actions may belie ethics. Jacob is rehashing his relationship with Seth for career reasons, but also to resolve some sense of dissatisfaction with how his friend’s life ended. He lays out enough of this for us with a believable earnestness that makes the story ring true.

A large problem with the book is that its concept automatically installs a narrative distance: we hear so much about Seth through these mildly disinterested characters, former classmates who are pressed (through interviews) to remember him. It ends up being a very talky story with little action that would at least alter the pace. And not having the story in front of us, so to speak, creates a lack of immediacy that removes us from any investment in the resolution.

This book is a profound examination of how grief shapes memory and vice versa; it's also about friendship and personal fulfillment and connection in a post-internet world, but it's memory that shapes both the crux of the story and the reader's experience of it. At alternating moments throughout the story, you will pity Jacob, you will roll your eyes at him, and you will also see yourself in him; you will be mad about it and also grateful that someone else understands these things that feel inarticulable most of the time. See Friendship is a singular novel that, to lean entirely on cliche, will stay with you for a very long time after it's over.