"Beartown" by Fredrick Backman

Knowing nothing about this novel except a shout-out from my penpal Sam Sifton from the New York Times cooking column, I had zero expectations.  I just know that when Sam mentions something to read it is usually a very good recommendation.

"Beartown" is a very good book and one that made me smile, frown and cry more than once.  The story is simple and familiar: a small town invests all its hopes and dreams in the fortunes of their sports team and when one of the team members commits a violent act the town must either come together for the victim or against the perpetrator or else face a huge crisis of conscience. Good vs evil, right vs wrong.

The thing that sets Backman's book apart from the tedium of the tale is, of course, the reality of his characters. They are flawed, every single one of them and many of them behave badly. But some overcome their personal angst-ridden excuses for that bad behavior and choose to do what's right.  Many do not.  That's the crucial tipping point for me:  not everyone gets redemption.

I cried many times, especially when Backman paints a portrait of emotions. His understanding of a parent's love of a child is stunning.  His detailing the everyday mundane boredom of a small town is spot-on: "The town wakes early, like it does every day.  The rows of cars in the parking lot are already covered with snow; people are standing in silent lines with their eyes half-open and their minds half-closed, waiting for their electronic punch cards to verify their existence to the clocking-in machine. They stamp the slush off their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they wait for their drug of choice - caffeine or nicotine or sugar - to kick in and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first break."

He writes about rejection from a sixteen year old's point of view: "He turns sixteen today and all his life he has been teased and rejected. About everything. His looks, thoughts, manner of speech, home address. Everywhere.  At school, in the locker room, online. That wears a person down in the end. It's not always obvious, because the people around a bullied child assume that he or she must get used to it after a while. Never. You never get used to it. It burns like fire the whole time. It's just that no one knows how long the fuse is, not even you."

There were times when I thought some editing could have been done, sometimes Backman was too wordy for me but then I read this book from start to finish in two days, so I certainly liked it.  The sport the small Canadian town focuses on is ice hockey, of course, and I learned a lot about hockey, not a bad thing to understand. Hockey could stand in for any sport in any small town, of course, like football in "Friday Night Lights" and it is a good vehicle to move the story along.

"There are few words that are harder to explain than "loyalty." It's always regarded as a positive characteristic because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worse things we do to each other occur because of the same thing."

In the end "Beartown" is a universal story about values, love, moral failures, honesty and betrayal. (And hockey.)  Basically it's about human nature with all its flaws and triumphs, as small and large, as beautiful and as ugly as they always are.  

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