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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atmosphere: What a Ride!

 

 

 

 

Atmosphere (2025)

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

Penguin Random Books, 352 pages.

★★★★★

 

In sections of recent U.S. history I used to hold up my cellphone and remind students that said phones have more far computing power than NASA had when it first sent astronauts into space. That remained so throughout the space shuttle program, which ended in 2011. Erstwhile astronauts were aware that theirs was an inherently dangerous profession. In essence, one had to be willing to die to advance science.

 

Novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid wanted her ninth novel to be different from the other eight. I’m a huge fan and never felt she was repeating herself, but Reid certainly took a big detour in Atmosphere, a novel about the early days on NASA. She did all the expected background work and even lived in Houston to get a firsthand feel of how astronauts train. Novels like Orbital and Atmosphere  remind me that I have the “wrong stuff” to go into space.

 

In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman to leave earth’s atmosphere. Reid mentions Ride in passing in Atmosphere, but her character Joan Goodwin is loosely based on Ride. If you can recall the 1980s, you might remember that it was a period in which NASA was caught up in social change and sought a number of “firsts,” as in first African American, first Asian, first teacher …. There over 8,000 applications for NASA’s 1977 class of recruits, just 208 were chosen, and a mere six were women. Reid’s novel follows the discrimination women faced through Goodwin’s eyes as she narrates her inner fears, her struggles with shyness, frustration, and a work/life balance.

 

Joan is a brilliant Stanford grad training to be a mission specialist. Those who might go up in the space shuttle lived semi-cloistered existences in assigned (and spartan) apartments on the NASA Mission Control campus. They could leave the campus when they had days off, a good thing in Joan’s case as her sister Barbara is an irresponsible single mom who sees Joan as someone who should be at her beck and call to babysit her 9-year-old. Joan tries her best as there is no one in the world she loves as much as her niece Frances (and vice versa).

 

Joan, a former astronomy professor, and her female colleagues compete in a macho world of “Top Guns” (as one reviewer pegged them), who think women have no place in space. The women on Joan’s team include Donna Fitzgerald, who harbors a secret, mission specialist Vanesa Ford, and Lydia Danes who can’t figure out why no one can see that she the smartest person in every room she enters. The men on the team are commander Steve Hagen, space cowboy Hank Redmond, and John “Griff” Griffin, who is an open ally for the women.

 

The narrative opens and (mostly) closes with a crisis. Joan, to the shock of some colleagues, became the first woman in space. She didn’t like it as much as she hoped, as she was sick to her stomach a lot. For the next flight she’s at Mission Control serving as CAPCOM, the voice on the ground communicating with the shuttle in flight. Call her stint, “Houston we have problems.” She must handle a crisis that’s analogous to a mash of the 1986 Challenger and the 2003 Columbia disasters, (though not entirely like either of them).  An explosion aboard leaves several astronauts dead and the shuttle so seriously damaged that NASA doubts it can survive reentry.

 

The novel has been a huge hit, understandable as it touches numerous target audiences. It’s a thriller, a work that looks at the price of ambition, a marvel, a paean to teamwork, and a lesbian love story. The latter are in the closet (though not as deeply as they wished) because in the 1980s anyone engaged in “immoral” behavior would have been dismissed NASA. Some readers have found the relationship unrealistic and/or syrupy. It does tiptoe to the edge of the latter but, in my view, backed off before it crossed the line of unbelievability. Unbeknownst to many Americans until recently, Sally Ride married a fellow astronaut, divorced him after five years, and then lived with her female lover for the last 27 years of her life.* Atmosphere doesn’t leave too many meanings of the word unexamined.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Before she did so, she asked her partner, a former pro tennis player, to reveal their relationship.

 

The Book of Longings: Sue Monk Kidd's Alt Look at Jesus

 

 

The Book of Longings  (2020/2024)

By Sue Monk Kidd

Viking Pres, 448 pages

★★★★★

 

This week features five-star novels, beginning with Sue Monk Kidd and a work that reappeared in 2024. Rightly so, as it’s stunner.

 

I recall a massive protest in front of Northampton’s Pleasant Street Theatre in 1988, when it booked Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. It was based on a 1955 novel from Nikos Kazantzakis, but I guess the diocesan Catholic bishop didn’t read translated Greek novels. He did, though, whip  up fervor among local Catholics to object to a movie none of them had seen. In the film Jesus marries Mary Magdalene (though it was perhaps a dream sequence). It was too much to contemplate Jesus in naked passion with Magdalene, even if she was played by Barara Hershey!

 

How far we’ve come. Recent scholars have pondered a fragment of an ancient Coptic scroll that seems to mention Jesus’s wife. Praise has been heaped upon the novel The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It takes a look at the life and crucifixion of Jesus from the perspective of a willful and intelligent girl named Ana, Jesus’s 15-year-old bride. Kidd deserves kudos for the reverent manner in which she handled her subjects and the brilliance with which she shows what it was like to be a first century A.D. Jewish woman. Hers is a Passion play seen through proto-feminist eyes.

 

Some of you may know songwriter John Prine’s whimsical talking blues “Jesus: The Missing Years.” Prine was a man of faith, but the song deals with the truism that the Bible says very little about Jesus’s life between his childhood and age 30 when he began his public ministry.  Kidd’s novel places Jesus in the context of the powerful Roman Empire of Caesar Augustus. Judea was a relative backwater of the Roman Empire, but one troubled by rebellions against Roman authority, including the terrorism of Zealots. (Yes, we got the word from the Bible.)  Th first century Levant was a whirl of competing religious faiths, philosophical views, politics, and social customs. Concerning the latter, it would have been unusual for the Jewish Jesus to be unmarried into his 20s.

 

Ana is the daughter of Matthias, a scribe to Herod Antipas. The household also includes Ana’s aunt Yaltha, who was exiled from Alexandria, and the orphan Judas Iscariot, who is protective of his half-sister Ana, though he’s already cast his lot with the  anti-Roman Zealots. Precocious Ana learned to read and write several languages, practically unheard of for Jewish girls. Matthias pampers Ana–until it’s time to consider a lucrative marriage. She is promised to an ugly, elderly man named Nathaniel and when she rebels, her parents blame her writing. For her defiance, Ana is offered to Herod as a concubine. Oddly, her refusal makes her a whore.

 

As Ana buries some of her scrolls in cave to save them, she meets Jesus, who is enamored of her fieriness and dubs her “Little Thunder.” In this narrative, Ana is the woman Jesus saves from being stoned to death, and insists he is engaged to her. They marry, move to Nazareth, and live with Mary, Jesus, and extended family, including a jealous sister-in-law. From this point on, Monk follows the Gospels fairly closely, except for Ana and Jesus’s stillborn daughter and Ana’s presence at key moments after Jesus meets John “the Immerser” and pursues the ministry that leads to his crucifixion.

 

Monk fashions narratives for Ana, Tabitha, Yaltha, Mary, and others after the “cult of Jesus” emerges. The Resurrection gets short shrift though an escape by Ana prefigures it. Ana eventually becomes the head of a community of female scholars and devotees of Sophia, a Platonic personification of Wisdom, a female aspect of God, with Jesus the male personification. 

 

Monk’s work is certainly not orthodox, nor is it intended to be. She retells the Gospels from a female point of view, places individuals in different roles than the synoptic Gospels, and situates characters within the polyglot realm of 1^st century AD.  Does she subvert Christian faith? Given what we don’t know, you could make the case that she makes Jesus more historical. An axiom of history is that the meaning of past events looks different depending upon the perspectives of those who lived them. Note that Monk’s title is The Book of Longings. Do we know what women longed for 2,500 years ago? How fascinating to speculate what might be written on as-yet-undiscovered sheets of parchment.

 

Rob Weir