The Lost Art of the Bromance

But most of the men McCarthy meets feel that they must compete and win in what Raymond, a retreat host in New Mexico and one of the book’s haunted philosophers of desert spaces, describes as a “hyper-individualistic, separated culture.” McCarthy is moved to hear Tim, a journalist from Sedona and another guru figure, observe that “men accomplish and move on.” “In my own experience, I’ve known that to be true,” McCarthy writes. “Life has been about achieving, with the majority of my friendships centering around work. When these work goals have been realized, the relationships . . . have tended to fade.”

McCarthy speculates at one point that his male friendships offer a categorically different sort of sustenance than his marriage does—not because of their nonsexual nature but because he and his guys are mutually encumbered by duty. “So often I’m preoccupied with . . . providing for my family, ensuring my kids’ futures,” he writes. “I squarely feel the burden of responsibility.” A part of him suspects that only men can truly relate to this pressure (though he wonders whether this is “just old-school male indoctrination and sexism”). Men long for buddies to help them process their performance anxiety, or even their failure and shame—none of which women can understand—but they also recoil from the thought of other men witnessing such vulnerability. It’s a paradox that suspends the specimens in McCarthy’s book between the camaraderie of the pub and the safety of the workbench, the office, or the gaming console.

“Who Needs Friends” reveals the shortcomings of the ballad-of-the-lonely-bros genre: a reliance on stock figures, a whiff of stiltedness, a monochrome emotional palette streaked with cruelty. (McCarthy has a habit of linking the ailing body politic to his interviewees’ “large,” “chubby,” “stout,” and “heavyset” physiques.) If the commentary on female bonding that flourished in the mid-twenty-tens seemed to partake of certain dreary stereotypes—of bossiness, passive-aggressiveness, volatility—the men’s-friendship discourse is straitjacketed and stiff, starved of vocabulary to describe its subjects’ inner lives.

The picture of friendship that emerges from books like McCarthy’s can feel romanticized and brittle. Fiction is able to explore the seams of self-interest and conflict that run across men’s social worlds with a freer hand. “See Friendship” (Harper Perennial), a novel by Jeremy Gordon that came out last year, presents a nuanced and honest image of how platonic male connections form and break. Its protagonist, Jacob, is a culture journalist in his mid-thirties who, like McCarthy, feels that he has lost his way in friendship. The men he knows tend to be colleagues whom he views as networking opportunities rather than as soulmates. When his bosses lean on him to start a long-form narrative podcast, he decides to tell the story of an old friend named Seth, who died a few years after high school. It’s partly a canny exercise in self-branding, a way to show himself off as smart and thoughtful, a good hang for listeners. But it’s also motivated by genuine nostalgia: Seth “was a membrane,” Jacob recalls. “He allowed everything and everyone to pass through.” Seth exuded a come-as-you-are warmth, an “invitational aura” that enveloped the entire class. By researching Seth, Jacob is trying to recapture or devise a purer form of relating.

Unsurprisingly, his efforts backfire. At the end of the novel, Jacob is forced to recognize that the ideal friend, as a construct, doesn’t exist. Gordon’s novel, in addition to its realism about what people can and can’t get from one another, offers a biting satire of the parasocial-friendship ecosystem of podcasts and social media. Working on his audio venture makes Jacob more narcissistic and less socially competent; the podcast deforms his understanding of what friends are for. Seth gets swept into Jacob’s project of self-creation, which doubles as an effort to be relatable to listeners that he will likely never meet. In a parasocial world, Gordon implies, ties are rooted in surface identification rather than in more robust connections, and friendship becomes an aspirational activity through which you pursue an identity you want.

What do we want from our friends? For most of history, “men were the great experts in friendship,” writes the scholar Tiffany Watt Smith in “Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship” (Celadon), a subtle and careful study of evolving attitudes about companionship and gender. She describes how, in the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle proposed a three-tiered model of friendship, with bonds of “utility” and “pleasure” as the bottom two rungs. These were the types of transactional or frivolous connections of which women—themselves shallow, inconstant, rivalrous—were thought to be capable. Men, though, could also form friendships characterized by “a complete merging and mingling of minds,” which oriented them toward a higher good. The seventeenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, of his attachment to his contemporary Étienne de La Boétie, “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: ‘Because it was him: because it was me.’ ”