Another Moving Work from Fredrik Backman

 

 

 

My Friends   (2025)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 434 pages

★★★★★

 

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don't think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

 

If you read these words to me before I read them and asked me who wrote them, I would guess Fredrik Backman. There are very few writers with a grasp of human nature, a youthful spirit, and a sense of humor, who can match Backman. He also deftly skirts the borders of sentimentality before exiting to make profound points.

 

Backman is best known for A Man Called Ove, a novel that should be on your reading list. If you saw the lame English remake movie (or even the vastly superior Swedish original), trust me; you have to read Backman to appreciate him.

 

My Friends is his tenth novel and a welcome break from his Beartown novels. They too are fine, but might not be your forte if you’re not into ice hockey. My Friends looks at teenagers, present and past. As Backman writes, “It's strange, the things you remember from your childhood, perhaps what you forget is even stranger. When you think about summers growing up, it feels like the sun was always shining, there's never any wind or rain in nostalgia.” How true, how true!

 

The novel opens with a crime that’s not a crime. Louisa is on the cusp of her 18^th birthday, is mourning the death of her orphanage pal Fish, and is on the run from the latest foster home in which she was placed. On her birthday she will be considered an independent adult. She wanders into an art auction in hope of scoring free food. Imagine her surprise when hanging on the wall is the painting of the postcard that is her most-prized possession: “The One of the Sea.” Louisa is moved to fury by the pretentious and ignorant remarks made by potential buyers, sneaks behind the ropes, and begins to spray paint a row of skulls–not on the painting, but on the blank wall beside it. Very few “see” the skulls the artist painted on the canvas. Louisa also knows,  “It isn’t a painting of the sea. Only a damn adult would think that.” Only her quickness and a leap into a culvert prevent her arrest. There, she meets a disheveled man whose POV is remarkably like hers. Another adult shows up and hands the painting to him.

 

He is J.Cat, a famous artist, who painted “The One of the Sea” when he was 14. He has just sold all that he owns to  buy it back. He says to his accomplice, “She’s one of us,” and hands Louisa the painting. She is shocked and tries to give it back because she is homeless. J. Cat is dying, though. Louisa lurks around his burial service. When the second man startles her, she accidentally spray paints him, which is how she formally meets Ted, J.Cat’s live-in caretaker for several years. He too needs a new home as the apartment was one of the things the artist sold.

 

My Friends is a multi-layered and laugh-out-loud funny novel, but its core is a summer 25 years earlier when the artist hung out with three other poor kids the summer each was 14: Ted, Joar, and a girl nicknamed Ali (for her willingness to fight). Each considered that summer the peak experience of their lives, though it was filled with trauma and all the crap that goes with being 14. What they do? They left their homes daily, yelled “HERE!,” sprinted to the pier, dove into the ocean, and yelled “HERE!” again when they surfaced. They snuck into movies, shoplifted food and drink, rode stolen bicycles, insulted each other, and loved each other dearly. Ted was the smallest and the “good” kid of the bunch.

 

We learn about those adventures and Louisa’s through an improbable long train journey to spread the artist’s ashes that Louisa finagles from Ted by trying to give back the painting. He has become a fearful young(ish) fuddy duddy and Louisa doesn’t have a polite bone in her body, nor does she have much worldly experience.  Surprises of all sort await readers. If some things seem unlikely, remember that Backman’s stories are shaped by other things–self-discovery, friendship, believing in each other, recovery from trauma, memory, kindness, and loyalty. Good formula and a terrific book!

 

Rob Weir