I’ve read other books that reward a reader in the same way as this one, bringing with it a powerful sense of grace and contentment: John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet and Frederic Tuten’s The Green Hour both come to immediate mind.  The thing these books all share is a true love for their subject matter, for the material of which they are composed (rather than for the ideas that animate them).  Berger writes about Portugal (and to a lesser extent his mother) with a loving tenderness while Tuten writes about art and a boy very like his godson with evident and equal ardor.  These are the qualities that Ben Jelloun brings to The Last Friend: tenderness, awe, respect, longing; in short, love.

This love for one’s material is what makes for the most rewarding stories (although not necessarily the greatest—none of the books I mentioned are great in the normal sense of that term).  More than writing what you know, as so many guidebooks suggest you do, I suggest that you write what you love, whatever or whomever that might be.

Ben Jelloun, though, refuses to clearly answer any such question.  Instead, his story offers a polyphony of voices, that of both Ali and Mahmoud as well as their mutual friend who serves as an intermediary when their relationship sours.  For you see, their relationship goes through a number of difficult periods, when petty jealousies and misunderstandings and spousal pique prevents the men from sharing their lives in any but the most superficial of ways.  And yet they find their friendship to still be pure in shape and character.

They believe in this relationship until the end, even after it has fallen away, because it has fallen away in order to maintain its purity.  As I read this story last week, I wondered how these men could hold on so long to their friendship, to their relationship.  If anything can remain pure, it is friendship.

But my own life seems to be characterized by impurity, an ever-widening sphere of compromise, disappointment, and betrayal.  My life began in betrayal and, I fear, will end in it, betrayal of loved ones, of oneself, of one’s values and principles.  How do we live, survive, in a compromised world?

Ben Jelloun, though, offers solace, for his characters are just as imperfect, just as compromised and impure as we.  They continue, nevertheless, to believe not in the possibility of purity in their lives, in themselves, in their relationships, but in the reality of good enough, perfectly good enough.  The friendship between Ali and Mahmoud, despite all its tribulations remains not simply good, in their eyes, but exactly enough for each of them, serving them to the unavoidable, inevitable end.