Review of The False Friend

I first came across Myla Goldberg in a short story anthology, with a story titled "Going for the Orange Julius."It captivated me on the first read, and it put her name on my "Authors to Watch" list. When I learned that she had a new book coming out, I just had to check it out. The result was pleasing, but not enthralling. While the premise is certainly intriguing, it falls far short of classic status.



The False Friend follows Celia Durst, twenty years after her best friend at age 11 disappeared. After a freak epiphany, she decides to fly home to Jensenville and face the truth. While she believes that she lied about the circumstances surrounding her friend’s disappearance, her friends at the time and family not only believe her story, but they have their own set of recollections to back it up.

The heart of this story is not the mystery--that’s obvious early on, so the reader isn’t led to believe that that the missing girl will reappear in some way. Rather, it’s the fallibility of memory, the emotional toll of an intense and competitive girlhood friendship, and the ways in which people change. It’s fascinating to learn the fates of each of the characters who witnessed the disappearance, none of whom turned out to be the mean girls they had once been--except perhaps the one who had been picked on most of all. After learning of Celia’s past, I was intensely interested in accompanying her search for the people who were a part of it, and would have been sorely disappointed if we had not learned of what had happened to each of the three girls.

The prose itself is expertly written, the craft of it nearly invisible, save for the occasional artful passage and redundant metaphor. It was easy enough to read at a comfortably adult level, but not too easy. The plot was unpredictable enough that I could keep guessing, until the end...and while I’m not generally a fan of most endings, this one worked well for me. However, Goldberg repeated some ideas much too often through her characters. There was an over-emphasis on the squandered "potential" that Celia and a few other gifted characters had when they were young...which is saddening, yes, but we got it the first time somebody mentioned it. Then there’s the sporadic injection of "we" into the narrative--the narrator’s third-person, outside of Celia’s mind, so a "we" is quite jarring, confusing the reader and creating a clichéd "universal" mentality.

The tone was consistent: quietly sad and existential. The prose felt muted. If it were a movie, all the colors would be washed out, and in order to hear properly the volume would have to be turned up all the way. I read this book best when it was really quiet, or so noisy that I couldn’t hear anything at all. This tone can turn dull in large doses, keeping me from reading more than a few chapters at a time in spite of my interest in the plot, characters and themes.

So while I did like the book, I did not love it. Perhaps I will read some of her other work, like Bee Season, the premise of which is interesting enough. Will I read The False Friend again? Maybe in a decade or two. I give it 3.5 stars...though that may be a bit generous.