See Friendship

The narrator of Gordon’s acerbic if exhausting debut reflects on people in his life who died young and his tenuous connections with former high school friends. Jacob, a 30-something magazine writer in New York City, hopes to get a raise and a promotion by starting a podcast. He heads to Los Angeles, where he meets with Kelsey, a classmate from his Chicago prep school. From Kelsey, Jacob learns that Seth, a gay Black man he was friends with, died from a heroin overdose a year after graduation, not from an ulcer as Jacob was originally told. Thinking the subject will appeal to his editors, Jacob successfully pitches a podcast about the mysterious circumstances behind the death, and the project morphs into more than he’d bargained for when he interviews classmate Lee, an indie rocker who might have sold Seth the heroin. Gordon’s scathing and often funny prose (the “fucked” state of America “added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up”) mostly makes up for his protagonist’s stifling self-absorption. Fans of Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland ought to take a look. Agent: Eloy Bleifuss, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)