Too much feeling, not enough restraint

I wanted to like My Friends more than I did.

There is a lot in it that should have worked for me. Louisa is a teenage artist who has bounced through foster homes and is still grieving Fish, her best friend. She sneaks into an auction just to see The One of the Sea, a famous painting that has meant something to her for years, gets thrown out, and then more or less accidentally meets the artist who painted it.

That is a great setup.

The problem is that the book keeps turning every emotional beat up to maximum volume.

Louisa does not just meet the artist behind the painting. She meets him when he is dying. He does not just talk to her about art. He leaves the painting to her. She does not just learn who the teenagers in the painting were. She ends up traveling with Ted while he tells her the story of this intense, formative group of friends and everything they survived together.

And the past timeline is full of the same kind of escalation.

Joar is living with a violently abusive father and starts carrying a knife because he thinks killing him may be the only way to save himself and his mother. Kimkim is closeted, isolated, and hiding drawings that he thinks nobody will understand. Ted loses his father. Christian, the school janitor who encourages Kimkim's art, dies. Ali eventually drowns. Even the story of how Kimkim gets a chance at art school involves the friends breaking into a museum to hang his work themselves.

Any one of those things could carry a novel.

In My Friends, they stack.

Backman is clearly interested in friendship as something almost sacred: the people you meet young can save you, wound you, shape your entire life, and live inside everything you make afterward. I actually like that idea. I also liked the connection between the painting and the ordinary moment it captures. The point is not that the sea is beautiful. The point is that the people sitting together are the thing that matters.

But the book kept telling me how much it mattered.

That was where it lost me.

There are scenes I probably would have found genuinely moving if the story had given them a little more room. Instead, grief leads into sacrifice, which leads into another revelation, which leads into another life-altering act of friendship. By the end I felt strangely less emotional than I did near the beginning because I had started anticipating the next attempt to devastate me.

I can see why people love this book. If you like Backman's very open, sentimental style, there is a lot here.

For me, it crossed over into melodrama often enough that I could see the machinery.

I liked what My Friends was about more than I liked My Friends.