The False Friend, by Myla Goldberg

Myla Goldberg wrote one of my favorite books, Bee Season, which is complex, original, and beautifully written. So it's hard to judge her new book, The False Friend, on its own merits, rather than comparing it to the Bee Season standard (which it does not come close to meeting).

The False Friend opens with 31-year-old Celia Durst having a flashback on the street in Chicago. She sees a VW bug and is reminded of her childhood friend Djuna Pearson, who disappeared 20 years ago. She suddenly has a flash of "memory"--Djuna did not get in a stranger's car, as Celia had told police, but had fallen into a hole in the woods by the road. Celia had seen her fall and, because they had been fighting, left her there and lied about what happened.

Celia tells her partner Huck, a high school history teacher with a marijuana habit, who supports her decision to return to her home in upstate New York to set things straight. Her visit to her depressed hometown is not what she expected, as her parents don't believe her new "memory" but do share some thoughts of their own--a rare occurrence in the Durst household. The three girlfriends who survived the day confront her with other recollections--about the ways in which she and Djuna bullied the other girls. At first, Celia seems not to believe them, but gradually her memory of the bullying returns. When Celia visits Djuna's mother, she is confronted with another view of herself--as the special girl who should have "amounted to" something to make up for the loss of Djuna. What Celia will do with all of these new views of herself remains unclear.

In the end, The False Friend doesn't seem to add up to much. There's no real suspense, although you might expect some due to the device of the "unsolved mystery" around which Goldberg constructs the story. While she does provide a frightening glimpse into bullying and its impact on the victims, I was left wondering whether self-knowledge would result in any change in the surviving perpetrator, Celia. And maybe that's Goldberg's point.

On the nitpicking side, Goldberg makes a few references to Celia's life as an employee of the Illinois Auditor General's office that weren't quite right. She refers to the Illinois General Assembly as the "state assembly," a term used in New York and California but not (as far as I know--and I once worked in the Illinois legislature) in Illinois. I know it's picky, but a state employee would not refer to the legislature in that way--nor would she say, as Celia does when explaining what she does to people in New York, "I work for the city." No Illinois state employee would say they worked for the city of Chicago!

Favorite passage:

The experience had reinforced his notion that adulthood didn't change people so much as smooth their edges, but now he wondered if there wasn't a chrysalis model of maturity. Perhaps the child transformed itself into an entirely different organism, its remnants discarded with the ruptured cocoon. Huck wondered if the Celia he knew was recognizable to friends who had only known her earlier incarnation, or if they were as baffled by her now as he was by the girl she claimed to have once been.