Fredrik Backman’s My Friends

 Fredrik Backman; My Friends; Novel; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Love; Friendship; Escapism

 

Especially in these dark and perilous times, a little bit of escapism may serve us well.  I have been thinking about starting a series of posts about normal life as the end of the United States as we know it approaches, similar to the posts about COVID that I published during (and after) the lockdown.  I published the COVID chronicles because historians were noting, as the pandemic spread, that we didn’t have good records of the experiences of everyday people during the 1919 flu epidemic.  They hypothesized that this was because people felt terribly about how badly they felt about not helping their neighbors who had been stricken and then quarantined.  I have not seen anything about not having records from ordinary Germans who were opposed to the Nazis, but I also haven’t seen reports of that – outside of the exploits of one Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgan Kohler, which I discovered teaching the history of psychology.

So, let it be noted that, in the Midwest, where the day to day stuff doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, despite the fact that this has been the most disruptive period in the history of the country, that a little escapist literature (as well as a No Kings March) has come in handy.  Reading this book transports me to a place and a time that is familiar and very far away, and to a crazy geographical space where the suspension of disbelief is helped by the dislocation that you may feel as you try to locate yourself in this fantastic but very familiar place and time.

Please don’t dismiss this book because it reads like it is written for young adult readers.  If they like it, more power to them.  But I found myself being transported by this book to my own adolescence and the weirdest thing happened – it caused me to fantasize about meeting my wife as an adolescent and that fantasy helped me fall in love with her all over again and in entirely new ways.  More on that later, but, for now, your results may vary and I can’t guarantee this will happen to you, but I do want you to know, up front, that this is a potentially powerful book.

It is a tale of discovery – two coming of age stories – well actually five – but the coming of age of a group that banded together before the age of cell phones and then the power of that coming of age story – and the art (both the story itself, but also the work of art that the story produced) to support the coming of age of the next generation – a girl who would have been one of us – both one of the four, but also one of those who have the gift to use art to connect us to each other – because she can see, both in the work of art, but also in humanity, what is there to be seen – as crazy and discomforting as that necessarily is.

I hesitate to articulate the plot because part of the delight of this story are the minor and major twists that the author so nicely keeps hidden from one moment to the next.  Suffice it to say (spoilers inevitably coming, but I will try to keep them minimal): this novel centers around the unfolding of the story of the group of adolescents who are now in their forties to an eighteen year old who comes from a similarly impoverished and simultaneously enriching background, one that includes a close friend and the kind of crushing losses that sear themselves into a person and, if they don’t turn them ugly, become an integral part of their beauty.

The old group were youngsters in a port city – one where life was grim for the parents – and even grimmer in school – especially if you were “different”.  People were not just ridiculed for the ways they stood out, they were assaulted for them – and the futures that lay over the horizon were actually all around them.  They would end up as cogs in the machinery of the port and old men and women like their mothers and fathers.  But these four kids fell in love with each other and knew that one of them, the most different, the most “special”, needed to get out.

So, one of the stories in this book is that story, the way that these kids conspired to get one of their own out of the mess they all found themselves in (and into an even bigger mess in the wide world - but isn't that the way of all things?).  This story unfolds as a member of that group recounts it to the girl who has grown up in foster homes and now finds herself without a home but with an artistic vision of the world that doesn’t have much room in it for the wealthy collectors of art who collect it not to appreciate its beauty but because it will appreciate in value.  She finds it heartbreaking that her favorite piece of art, a piece of art that truly moves her, is likely to be hermetically sealed.

This book borrows something from Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch.  I had a sense of that, and then the author quoted Tartt!  Both books are meditations on the relationship between art and trauma, and both are wary of the collectors of art – and want us to appreciate the art that we are holding in our hands.  And that piece of art is the story – and here we get two stories for the price of one…

The story of the kids in the book unfolds as one of the friends, one who loved the artist – perhaps the most – travels with the girl back to the harbor town where the kids all grew up together.  They are travelling there to bring the story of the four kids full circle, but the story of how they get there is the second story.  Two things are important about that second story.  The first is that the girl is as irritating to the story teller – who has always suffered the other members of the club – as any member of that club was, and the land they are travelling across – they travel by train – is not quite Europe and not quite America – but it is clearly one or the other while simultaneously being neither – helps us be disoriented as we read.  We are never quite sure where we are in either space or time – and meanwhile we are jumping back and forth between the past and the present.

Just one of the remarkable observations of Louisa, the girl who makes the cross-country trip with Ted, the friend of the artist and the rest of the members of the group, is that, in a story, when it is heard for the first time, things are not happening in the past, but now.  Backman’s use of hyperbolic language continually calls our attention to this story as it is unfolding - it is happening NOW.  We are as irritated at Backman as we are at Louisa for the outlandish importance he and she attach to every little thing – and then we (or at least I) remember how ridiculously connected to the world we used to be as adolescents – when everything meant something and we wanted to know it all.

So it was from that frame of mind that I rediscovered my Reluctant Wife.  We met as pretty well formed professionals -  and we agreed that had we met as adolescents we would not have hit it off (my Reluctant Wife was Queen of the Nerds while I, a closet nerd, was a wannabe hippie who was acting the part of the rebel without a cause).  But this book is, at heart, about the love of a group of kids – very much like the group(s) that we both belonged to – in High School and in College – that cared deeply about each other.  The group(s) that had each other’s backs while also having it out with each other in a variety of ways – I could work my way into imagining us – she and I – as members of just such a group.  And aren’t we?  Isn’t our family a reflection of those groups as well as our families of origin?  Aren’t our friend groups halfway spaces on the way to a place that we will someday call home?

Perhaps the disorientation in the reading of this book is the necessary experience of being neither fully a member of my nuclear family any more (though the kids in both generation in this book had varying degrees of nominal families – though those families did play significant and essential parts in the book.  And Louisa had both a family and friends that predated her travels with Ted), nor of yet having a family of my own yet.  That in between space where we float a bit – trying this and that on for size.  It is helpful to the plot that Ted never quite managed to get to having a family of his own – and it is interesting that Louisa is pushing him to go there.  Of course, Ted is Backman’s alter ego – there are biographical hints – but more importantly, Louisa pushes Ted to tell this tale and he intends to do it, while it is, of course, Backman who is actually telling this story.

Since Ted is gay and Backman is a family man we might assume that Backman read Freud and agreed with his position that we are all born both hetero and homo sexual, but I think he would actually say that we are all capable of being in love with the world.  This book articulates that love beautifully – and it is the perfect antidote to the hate and destruction that seems to be threatening to obliterate our world.  Fortunately, we cannot forget that life is best lived in loving connection with others.   

  

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