If we are to believe the doomsayers, entrenched problems like drugs, homelessness, car break-ins, and years of COVID isolation have led to a fraying of our social bonds that have turned cities—especially San Francisco and Oakland—into foreboding places people can’t leave soon enough. But from the opening pages of Tomas Moniz’s new novel, All Friends Are Necessary (288 pages; Algonquin), Moniz wrests our minds from the catastrophists by capturing the sheer exuberance of the San Francisco Bay Area—with its beloved parks, bars, museums, Mission Street bookstores, and East Bay cronut shops. The novel celebrates the quirky denizens who brim with life and make this rich bounty sparkle. This is familiar turf for Moniz whose previous novel, Big Familia (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a Lambda Literary award),also referenced local venues and emphasized community. But here, Moniz explores how place, the magic of friendship, and the natural world combine to heal the uncontrollable losses we encounter in life.

In All Friends, we meet Efren “Chino” Flores, a 38-year-old Latino science teacher, after he and his wife, Luna, have just lost a late-term pregnancy, which ends their marriage. Chino is still living in the couple’s Seattle apartment, complete with an empty nursery, when his friend Metal Mike arrives to help Chino move back to San Francisco. (The friends met and bonded at a Hole concert there when they followed Courtney Love to the 38 Geary bus stop.) In a poignant scene, Metal Mike stands by as a witness as Chino takes a last look at the baby’s room before vacating the apartment, closing the door on the family Chino thought he’d have.

Metal Mike introduces Chino to his friends Kay and Mike and the circle expands; the friends are now Chino’s, too, and the group bonds. Their banter and dialogue are the lifeblood of All Friends. The characters feel like people you might want to hang out with, not just for the duration of the novel but after the last page. As friends, their presence hums as they show up, make space for, and move Chino along as he searches for apartments, work, and companionship. With their support, he meets and dates liberally, entering a period of sexual exploration.

All Friends mines the experience of what it takes to recover from loss with sensitivity. Small gestures accumulate. Chino’s descriptions of touch, camaraderie, and kindness are woven with passages about ferns, “with their versatile absorption habits and their deep network of roots.” We learn ferns “have rhizomes, horizontal stems tucked away underground that stay protected and help them survive the extreme environmental events they must endure.” For Moniz, cities echo what lies below the forest floor: “This little town of ours, these streets, the way things lead back to each other, the fact that everything criss-crosses and intersects, all these events coming together make me want to believe in something like resolution or purpose, that … joy, finds a way back to you.” With so much social pressure aimed at creating normative nuclear families, All Friends Are Necessary is reflective of a broader lens that suggests our social bonds aren’t a luxury and shouldn’t be an afterthought. They are what enables us to thrive and are nothing less than the key to our survival.

H. L. Onstad’s fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Harvard Review, Solstice Magazine, and HA Journal, a publication of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.