An unlikely friendship in a harsh world

Slate. Schist. Bone. Hardness is an indisputable fact of nature, found wherever we look, in the exterior world as well as within ourselves. Sue Halpern’s intense, gorgeously layered and hard-to-get-out-of-your-head first novel, “The Book of Hard Things,” considers this hardness as it manifests itself in human relations, while also illuminating those moments of grace that make such hardness endurable.

Cuzzy Gage, a young man living on the streets just four months out of high school, knows well the flinty experience of poverty, the mechanics of want and need. His life is a shambles, his mother dead, his father in a mental institution. Tracy Edwards, the other main character, comes from the realm of money and top-notch education; still he finds the comforts of cash and sophistication an insufficient cushion against the soul-numbing barrenness he experiences at the death of his best friend, Algernon Black. Tracy moves into Larches, the mountainside wooded estate owned by Algernon’s family -- near where Cuzzy is barely scraping by -- in order to mourn his loss and continue Algernon’s work as an ethnomusicologist.

Cuzzy and Tracy meet and forge an unlikely and often uneasy friendship. The two are polar opposites: Cuzzy has lived his entire life in the redneck town of Poverty, “so named the day the child-welfare lady went door-to-door asking questions and, upon hearing the answers, declared, ‘Why, you’re living in poverty!’ ” He is the archetypal child of Poverty -- abandoned, undereducated, trying to make the best of his limited options. A father already, he has an infant son named Harrison Ford by the child’s mother; she works on the local road crew and knows of the larger world from reading People magazine. Cuzzy has no job, no prospects, no real future to look toward. Tracy roars into town in a Porsche convertible. He has lived his life on a grander scale and has seen much more of the world than Cuzzy, yet he is painfully aware of his own brand of deprivation: He misses Algernon terribly, and he wishes he could move about as easily in the natural world as Cuzzy does. Each has things to give the other, and when Tracy hires Cuzzy as a research assistant the two stumble and lurch figuring out how to offer and accept them.

The Roman historian Tacitus once wrote that true friendship seeks or creates equals, and that is exactly the organic process readers witness. Under Tracy’s tutelage, Cuzzy learns something about poetry and music and watches his life and his options expand. “Cuzzy was beginning to wake up to the world. His wariness, that of the fox prowling the margins, was still there, but his diffidence lifted now and then like a curtain, parting to show what might have been -- if his father hadn’t been taken away; if his father wasn’t sick; if his mother hadn’t died -- and what might be there yet.” Tracy learns to embrace the natural world, to find in the hush of the forest and the call of the birds a place that might feel like home.

“The Book of Hard Things” deftly celebrates those rare moments when nature reveals its full beauty; when friendship is accompanied by grace; when poetry, literature and understanding transcend the borders of our being. These occurrences, Halpern suggests, work a kind of chemistry on the slatelike hard things of life, softening them up, making them porous, dilating the soul.

Yet, for all the mercy found in human interaction, the novel is ultimately about hardness. The citizens of Poverty, wary of any genuine friendship between men, view the developing relationship between Cuzzy and Tracy with suspicion and dismay. They must be homosexuals, many suppose. As one character points out to Cuzzy, the whole idea of male friendship is unfathomable to the townspeople: “Sex, they get. Sex is a motive. But friendship is so intimate. And they are going to say, ‘Why did an educated guy from the city want to be friends with a guy like you?’ ” Cuzzy and Tracy maintain an unsteady balance over the chasm that divides the world of ideas, poetry and nature from the world of poverty, envy and ignorance -- until the night Cuzzy’s friends come to visit and the two worlds collide.

Halpern, whose previous books (“Four Wings and a Prayer” and “Migrations to Solitude”) explored the mysteries of monarch butterflies and the secrets of solitariness, combines here the watchful eye of the nature writer with the insight of the novelist, creating a work that moves easily on both levels. Tragic endings, her story suggests, cannot erase the bounty that preceded them. Moments of true friendship are an expression of grace and, as such, are as much a part of the mystery of life as all the hostility and hardness that surround them.