Beartown is a beautiful book. In my mind, its title is a perfect representation of what the book is about: a town. Because what is a town if not the sum total of the people who live there?
It is simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-lifting, and is told through vignettes of varied characters in the town, but even the smallest of these characters feel real. Almost every character has depth; I felt sympathetic towards many of the characters at least once, and felt like they mostly fit into and interacted with Beartown in realistic ways.
The story itself is about hockey, a town, and a tragedy.
As someone who played hockey for many years, I feel like it did a very good job at capturing the beauty, the pain, and the struggle of the sport, both on and off the ice. The feeling of flying when you step on the ice is one I still remember fondly. But the locker room jokes and crassness that often comes with adolescence, although depicted more extremely than is perhaps completely realistic, certainly captures some part of what does happen in the real world. And, as seen in some of the scenes in the high school, these are not limited to the locker room, and of course are not to a single sport.
But the story is more than about hockey, it is about a tragedy that occurs and how a town deals with it. In this regard, the story excels because of the characters that we experience the story through. Many times, Backman does an excellent job at showing rather than telling, and the space he leaves carries a great emotional weight. The story does not follow a simple emotional arc, but instead, as I wrote above, has so many chapters that are simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-lifting. Often, there are multiple vignettes in the same chapter that complement each other in a way that makes a sum greater than its parts. This aspect of the writing is probably the greatest strength of the book.
I do have some criticisms, though.
At times some of the scenes felt a little bit cliche. Backman will lead the reader to believe one thing only to subvert their expectation in the next paragraph or chapter. Since this occurred multiple times, it was an easy pattern to follow. I think Backman wrote well enough otherwise to get away with this, but it almost got old by the end of the book.
The characters, though realistic, sometimes reacted in ways that felt a little forced. I think I felt this most strongly with some of the adult characters, especially when they acted less mature, and their actions sometimes felt like a predestined conclusion. Take Maggan Lyt going into a shouting fit, for example. Here, Backman’s writing seemed to follow this logic: Maggan is an overbearing parent, therefore, she will shout in every scene when she can. This made me feel like some of the scenes and characters lacked the nuance that would have made them much stronger otherwise.
The writing style overall was also somewhat difficult to get into, broken up into the vignettes like it was. It felt very modern and, although I thought it did fit this book (as I said, I think the emotional combinations that came through these vignettes was the strongest part of the book), I think it may not have worked well in another kind of book. It will be interesting to read Backman’s other books and see what I think of them!
Overall, despite my criticisms, I still found Beartown to be a a beautiful and emotional book, and would consider revisiting it in the future.
3.8/5