The lovingly bickering, bantering cast of Small Joys calls to mind a British Friends if the show's characters weren't entirely straight and white. With a nimble touch and arch humor, first-time novelist Elvin James Mensah captures the quintessence of friendship: its surrogacy for family, its allowance for self-absorption, and its elastic capacity for forgiveness. Narrator Harley Sekyere, who is 21, Black and gay, was so overcome by anxiety at university that he dropped out and returned to Dartford. As the novel opens, he's in the woods near his flat and holding an X-Acto knife when a stranger interrupts his suicidal thoughts. Twenty-three-year-old Muddy Barlow is, it turns out, Harley's new flatmate. Unlike Harley, Muddy is white, apparently happy and apparently straight: he used to date their mutual friend Chelsea. This won't be the last time Muddy rescues Harley; his unflagging loyalty soon becomes clear. What's fuzzy is whether the two young men want the same things from each other--and, anyway, do they even know what those things are?
Mensah is keenly attuned to the expectations of new adults; as Harley puts it, "I'd staked so many of my future glories on my twenties signaling something.... I'd made it, I'd say." But Harley isn't the only one who's not quite making it, and the wisecracking, foulmouthed conversations within his friendship cluster burble over with salubrious understanding. A gentle novel about a hard time, Small Joys delivers exactly what's promised by its title. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer