“We Should Not Be Friends” traces Schwalbe’s unlikely and occasionally rocky 40-year friendship with Chris Maxey, a former Navy SEAL and founder of the ecologically oriented Island School on Eleuthera in the Bahamas (one of their several points of tension is Schwalbe’s unthinking use of plastic straws). The two men were both recruited for a secret society at Yale in the ’80s, where Maxey was a jock, a bulging-biceped, extroverted wrestler who occasionally hurled homophobic obscenities, and Schwalbe an indoorsy classical civilization major with a perm and a penchant for Prince. When Maxey gives “Schwalbs,” as he nicknames him, a ride on his Yamaha 850 motorcycle, which he calls the Bitch, awkwardness doesn’t just ensue — it spews.
The society, never named but not Skull and Bones, taps 15 rising seniors who have nothing particular in common to dine together twice a week, with an unlimited account at the liquor store and a keg in the basement of their granite meeting hall. (Schwalbe likes drinking, he freely admits, almost as much as he likes books.) Membership will be “the best chapter in your soft, preppy, silver-spoon, privileged life,” a recruiter swears to Maxey. The group bonds, they graduate, pursue their brilliant careers, pair up, procreate (or not), split up and stay sporadically in touch.
One dies young in a terrible accident. Others, including Maxey and Schwalbe, find themselves with bafflement sprawled on the shoals of upper middle age, beset with unsettling diagnoses: neuropathy, bum hips, hearing loss, even brain tumors. What starts out with a slight vibe of “The Secret History,” Donna Tartt’s sinister novel about a privileged college clique — Schwalbe falls into bed with an angelic-seeming man who keeps a rusty serrated knife on the floor nearby — progresses into something more like Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie.” You might call it “Tuesdays With Maxey,” except that Schwalbe goes for long periods without talking to his athletic pal at all.
Reductive though this may sound, “We Should Not Be Friends” is an object lesson in the difference between male and female communication styles. Many times when Schwalbe restrains himself from confiding in or asking something of Maxey — like what terrible thing happened to him when he was stationed in Panama — I found myself wanting to scream: “SAY IT! JUST SAY IT!”
He takes forever to find out the names of Maxey’s four children and balks on writing a check to his nonprofit. Subconsciously wary of seeming as if he’s making a pass, he shrinks at bear hugs or declarations of brotherly love. “I often feel that I would have been far more comfortable in Edwardian England where a nod or bow in someone’s general direction with perhaps a tip of the hat was all that was usually required,” he admits.
