My Friends

by Fredrik Backman ★★★★☆

It's hard to believe, but My Friends was my first full foray into Fredrik Backman. I initially picked up Anxious People years ago after hearing so many people rave about it, but I had trouble connecting with the characters and the dialogue and it was a rare book that I did not finish. With many calling My Friends Backman's best, I decided it was time I give him another try.

My Friends opens with a young woman named Louisa, on the cusp of infiltrating an art auction. Louisa is a day short of her 18th birthday, but she's lived more life than someone her age should have to. She's an orphan who has bounced around foster homes and recently lost the one true friend that she made in her difficult life. Louisa has plans for what she wants to do to disrupt the auction, but she also has a specific painting she wants to see: "The One of the Sea". Louisa got a postcard of the painting from one of the many foster homes she lived in. It was the first thing she ever stole and the first "really beautiful thing she ever touched."

A series of events lead her to unknowingly meeting the artist of her most beloved painting, known only as "C. Jat", who recognizes in her a kindred artistic spirit. He sends one of his closest friends, Ted, to find Louisa after their chance encounter, and Louisa comes to learn through Ted the details of the creation of the painting, as well as the tight-knit bond that Ted, C. Jat (known primarily as "The Artist" for most of the book), and two additional friends had during their youth. The story bounces between the present day and flashbacks to 25 years prior, where the four friends form a found family that isolates them from troubled home lives and allows them forge forward during difficult teenage years.

Backman is well known for foreshadowing tragedy, and that's also the case in My Friends. The flashback stories all center around a single summer that "started and ended with death." Domestic violence and addiction both play significant roles in the story, and its an constant chronicle of the resiliency of children against their parents' demons. The friends find peace in each other and in spending long afternoons sitting on a dock leading out to the sea, an image that The Artist captured in his famous painting. There are typical teenage hijinks that they create, often filled with levity, to balance the atypical teenage burdens that they must all endure along with the normal challenges of being fourteen.

Backman can pull together a multi-threaded tale, and in My Friends he does a solid job of bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion; I can see the appeal of his storytelling to a broad audience. He creates little character quirks that he repeats throughout, locking them into the reader's memory. For example, at the end of each day, the friends call out "tomorrow" to each other rather than "goodbye", as a promise that they will all be there for each other the next day despite the dangers and abuses that may await them at home. Backman tends to be overly sentimental and occasionally profound, with quotes like "Grief is a gift. It's the price we pay for love," and "We don't forget the ones we lose. We don't get over them. We just learn to live alongside them," peppered throughout.

But...there's a gap for me, and I'm not sure its source. Backman writes in his native Swedish, and his books are then translated into dozens of languages. I suspect it's some combination of the translation not fully capturing tone mixed with, perhaps, cultural differences with Swedes that make some of the dialogue and character interactions just feel a little off. In My Friends (and in the bits of Anxious People that I read), Backman tends to write characters who all seem to be approaching the autism spectrum, and some who may be fully on it. There is definitely some intentionality there—Louisa, for example, doesn't like to be touched, and has trouble with impulse control—but there may be other traits that appear borderline autistic that are unintentionally presented (or interpreted) as such. Regardless, it makes for some stilted or jagged interactions at times. The quirkiness of all of the characters mixed with moments of profundity prevented me from fully connecting with the novel. It's hard to have a sentence like "The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else's belief in them" followed shortly after by a fart joke or a fistfight, but that's a bit of what you get.

Backman has legions of fans, and rightly so, and for those that love his his style of writing, My Friends will be a winner. For me, it was more of a confirmation of what I suspected when I started Anxious People: he's probably not for me. I could appreciate many of the moments that Backman creates, but my inability to fully connect with the book kept it at arm's length. It's still a better-than-average read for me, but it falls short of my upper tier of novels because of that lack of complete connection.