GOING HOME, by Tom Lamont

Tom Lamont’s “Going Home” is an exceptionally touching novel in multiple ways. It’s a story of fathers and sons. Male friendship and all its many — and not often discussed — complications. Jewish community, culture and faith. What goes into raising a young boy, and tending to loved ones who are at the end of their days. The cruel trick the universe plays that brings us from child to adult to child again over the course of our lives.

At the core of this novel is the question “What does it mean to care?,” and it considers both senses of the word: to care for, and to care about, someone.

Lamont’s literary debut is set in the London suburb of Enfield, and is told largely from the alternating perspectives of four impeccably drawn characters. Téo Erskine, 30, has left Enfield for life in the big city, but dutifully returns once a month to visit his elderly father. His close childhood friend is Ben Mossam, whose parents moved abroad when he finished school, leaving him with a house and money but not many reasons to grow up. Téo’s well-enough-meaning father, Vic, does his best to hide his ailing health and wonders why providing for his family — despite being distant at times — isn’t sufficient to rate him as a good father. And the new progressive rabbi in town, Sibyl, is doing her best to win over a board of more traditional congregants while grappling with her own growing questions around faith.

Tying these characters together is 2-year-old Joel, one of the most charming children put to the page in recent memory. The novel carefully shows the way the child’s very existence changes each of the other characters’ lives, all while perfectly encapsulating the frustration, boredom, anxiety and tremendous bursts of tenderness that come from raising a young one, even when that young one is not your own.

After Joel’s mother, Lia — Téo’s unrequited love — dies by suicide, this all-ages group of lads, plus Sibyl the rabbi, earnestly try to watch over Joel in the wake of baffling tragedy. Can they make room in their lives for a toddler until social services can find Joel’s biological father or caring foster parents? Or will one of them end up caring for him permanently in Lia’s absence?

I’ll take a moment here to applaud Lamont’s human, heartfelt and nonjudgmental portrait of depression and suicide. Rabbi Sibyl doesn’t shy from addressing the manner of Lia’s death in her eulogy, saying that Lia had been failed in life by those who were slow to help. “She would be failed as much in death,” Sibyl adds, “were anybody to criticize her or blame her — ask, how could she? — without trying to understand that for Lia the question might have been, how could she not?”

With nights out, a football match, a trip to Scotland, poker games, pints and even a bit of pill-popping and subsequent street-puking, Lamont shows his talent for revealing the depth of the characters’ feelings through their small, quotidian joys and tragedies. It is here where Lamont’s years as a journalist (for The Guardian and GQ) clearly translate into a canny understanding of surface-level wants alongside deeper, subconscious motivations.

Though at times the plot can feel a tad tidy, the sight of a few seams doesn’t take away from this funny and poignant, bittersweet and moving — yet never maudlin — debut. “Going Home” made me cry on more than one occasion, and laugh out loud many more times. It’s a terrific reminder that what binds us to our loved ones isn’t blood but the care we take to keep them close, and our ability to show up for them when we screw it up on the first go-round.

GOING HOME | By Tom Lamont | Knopf | 287 pp. | $28