The Best of Friends

Throughout The Best of Friends, characters continually perform versions of themselves, often for survival, approval, or social acceptance. Dani dons the “good-wife smile” even while enduring Bryan’s abuse. Kendra stages elaborate dinner parties with store-bought meals and prides herself on being the “cool mom,” despite her family’s unraveling behind closed doors. Lindsey clings to optimism and control, presenting herself as tirelessly competent while her private life erodes. These performances extend beyond the home: The boys perform masculinity in front of each other, especially Sawyer, whose aggressive posturing hides romantic vulnerability. The novel subtly interrogates the cost of these roles—how performing wellness, motherhood, or marriage becomes a form of self-erasure. Ultimately, the collapse of these personas is what allows the characters to confront the truth and begin to heal.

In the placid suburbs of The Best of Friends, violence erupts in different forms and on widely varying scales; whether as sudden, deadly gunshots in the night or (much more frequently and insidiously) as jabs of cold sarcasm or sharp pinches under the table. All seem out of place in the Edenic gated community of the novel’s setting; but the catastrophic shooting at the Schultzes’ house, which panicked the neighbors and snuffed out two young lives, was perhaps the more innocent form. The quarrel that led to the shooting—an impulsive, mostly accidental act—was the climax of drunkenness and adolescent rage, and would probably have quickly blown over, had there not been a handgun on the scene.

The subtle, almost invisible violence inflicted on Dani by her husband Bryan, on the other hand, has gone on for decades and with cold premeditation: painful squeezes, pinches, and sharp twists of her joints, all calculated to pass unnoticed by others and to fall just short of actionable assault. Almost as menacing are Bryan’s frequent acts of emotional violence: his “hissing,” threatening remarks, his insults (“How could you be so stupid?” [79]), his glares and bullying body language, his sneering dismissal of Dani’s legitimate worries and opinions. Over the years, Dani has become increasingly passive and depressed, and has lost the respect of her daughter Luna—showing that small but aggregate acts of violence like Bryan’s can wield as much power to warp a life and destroy a family as a sudden burst of gunfire. Significantly, it was Bryan’s son Caleb who fired the first shot in the late-night tragedy, using his father’s handgun; The Best of Friends hints that Caleb’s instability and hotheadedness could be a product of his tense homelife—a metaphorical “pistol” that finally went off. Years of cold, repressive, all-but-hidden violence, then, can slowly poison a household and eventually explode into deadly mayhem. Worse, if it can happen in a gated, affluent suburb of green lawns and soccer moms, it can happen anywhere.

The Best of Friends dramatizes how secrets, however well-meaning, can undermine trust and lead to resentment, hurt feelings, estrangement, and even—in the case of Sawyer and Jacob—deadly conflict. In the “close-knit suburban community” (1) where the novel’s three narrators have lived all their lives, privacy has always been at a premium, and secretiveness becomes almost a reflex. Dani, for instance, kept her teenage crush on Paul a secret from her friends, which has led to a decades-long resentment of Kendra, who married Paul without knowing about Dani’s feelings about him. Over the years, she has even deviously given Kendra advice that she “knew would upset Paul rather than calming him down” (227), praying for a break-up. This foreshadows the secret jealousy of Jacob, who watches in agony as his lover Sawyer callously plays the part of a romantically unattached man who is interested only in girls. Jacob’s secret anguish, in turn, pushes the defensive Sawyer into a deadly quarrel with Caleb, who explodes in shock over his two friends’ constant “lying” to him: By deceiving and excluding Caleb, Sawyer and Jacob have driven a deadly spoke into the “third wheel” of their triangular friendship.

Secrets within marriages, in the novel, fare little better. Kendra suffers a devastating blow-up with Paul when he discovers that she has been secretly doping their son Reese with Adderall, without telling either of them. Kendra had only wanted to help Reese’s school career; as a result, she almost dooms her marriage. (Oddly, the fact that Paul has been sneaking sleeping pills into Kendra’s tea goes unmentioned in their arguments.) Lindsey’s husband Andrew, meanwhile, has been texting loving messages to another (married) woman, seeking the emotional intimacy that has long been missing from his own marriage. Like Kendra’s deception, his infidelity is exposed by the police investigation into the shooting, showing the fragility of secrets in a small community—and adding to the tragic loss of their sons another excruciating breach of trust.