Review by Booklist Review
Amos and Emerson have been friends since they first met in college over 30 years ago. Their families celebrate holidays and birthdays together. Even their teenage daughters are friends. While celebrating Emerson's fifty-second birthday at his tony upstate New York home one autumn, a stunning act of betrayal is committed, the details of which remain unknown at the time. Only later, when Amos and his wife, Claire, learn of the deed do the fault lines in each relationship begin to widen. Ebbott's simmering debut is a master class in subtly creating tension through shifting first-person interpretations of events. He expertly dissects human relationships and family dynamics while delving into each character's subconscious to establish their insecurities and petty jealousies and unpack age-old trauma. Ebbott cleverly alternates sympathies while exploring the human need to have facts align with what we want to be true and the delusions we create to maintain our sense of self. Dexterous prose, pithy one-liners, and a delectable mélange of passive aggression and gaslighting among characters establish Ebbott as a new star.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ebbott focuses his gaze on two wealthy couples in his elegant debut. Unscrupulous lawyer Emerson, who's married to dissatisfied Retsy, has been friends with psychiatrist Amos since high school, and with Amos's physician wife Claire since childhood. Their 16-year-old daughters, Anna and Sophie, have been thrown together for years but are growing apart. One October, Emerson invites Amos and his family for a weekend at his country house outside New York City. The weekend's peace is disturbed first by minor incidents--a twisted ankle, a broken bottle, a joke taken as an insult--and later by a horrifying betrayal. Months later, one character, whose life has been shattered by the events of the weekend, reveals a secret to the others, who must then decide how to handle the revelation. In refined prose that feels like a throwback to mid-20th-century psychological realism, Ebbott lays bare the many ways in which the families harm each other as each character seeks to protect the status quo of their "smooth, edgeless life." The novel's hothouse atmosphere can feel a bit static--the characters appear to exist outside of time and of any society but their own, as if released from the amber of a John Cheever story--but it's also the novel's greatest strength, as Ebbott conjures up a world where mental machinations trump morality. It's an alluring accomplishment. Agent: Grainne Fox, UTA. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A subtle, keenly intelligent, psychologically deft--and deeply grim--portrait of friendship, marriage, and parenthood among the New York upper crust. Emerson and Amos met and bonded three decades ago in college, and their families--wives Retsy and Claire, teenage daughters Sophie and Anna--seem happily entangled, mutually supportive. As the novel begins, they've assembled at Emerson and Retsy's country house to celebrate Emerson's 52nd birthday. But tensions simmer beneath the surface: between the men, within the marriages, even in the relationship between the daughters, which has entered the awkwardness of late adolescence and may or may not survive. In a "friendly" tennis match against Amos, Emerson suffers an ankle injury that, as a memento mori and a reminder of ancient rivalry, exacerbates the tensions both within and without. Before the weekend is over, a spontaneous act of violence and violation will threaten not only to destroy the long friendship but to jolt both families from the comfortable orbits of their privileged, on-the-surface untroubled lives. It's a prospect Claire in particular seems ill-prepared for. This is the kind of book Tom Wolfe used to write, and debut novelist Ebbott definitely has the talent and brio to carry it off. "Unflinching" is a label often applied to such works, but that word's not nearly strong enough for what happens here; this is a very smart book, but at its center is a ruthlessness that can be hard to look at. Whether that's a compliment or not may depend on the reader. Ambitious, penetrating, occasionally brilliant--and a little cold. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
