Johanna Frid has moved away from the relationship novel for her third book, "Marianne?", and the shift does not fully convince Dagens Nyheter's reviewer Åsa Beckman. In a review published Friday, Beckman writes that the author's voice remains as sharp and funny as before, but that the borrowed true crime framework does not hold together all the way through.
The novel follows Eric Swenson, a journalist at an American radio station whose career has not gone as he hoped. According to Dagens Nyheter, the story opens with a family photograph: a girl in a checked dress with a white collar standing between her parents. Within a few years, the family will die in an arson fire at their home in Dunedin, Florida. For now, they smile at the camera.
Why it matters
Frid arrived in 2018 with "Nora eller Brinn Oslo brinn", which Dagens Nyheter describes as one of the funniest novels about relationships written in Sweden and which won the newspaper's culture prize. A second novel, "Haralds mamma", followed in 2023. Her third book therefore arrives with expectations attached, and its genre change is the central question the review weighs.
Beckman's verdict is split. The writing is intact; the architecture around it is not. She argues that Frid's gaze on human bonds remains penetrating, and that the books carry a loneliness that blows cold through them. Whether that biting view comes from feeling outside, or causes the outsider position, is a question the reviewer leaves open.
A journalist chasing a twin he never knew
The plot turns on a detail in the photograph. The girl, Marianne, has a red birthmark shaped like a heart. So did Eric's twin sister. The two were adopted at birth into separate families, Dagens Nyheter reports, and Eric now wants a documentary series that establishes who Marianne was. He is already imagining the prizes the project might bring him.
His relationship with his own mother is distant. He reluctantly attends a monthly Sunday dinner at her house in a Chicago suburb. According to the review, other people become interesting to Eric chiefly once they can serve as material for his work.
His search takes him across the United States. The people he meets, in bars and beauty salons among other places, hold conflicting pictures of Marianne, and he gradually comes to understand that she did not die in the fire after all. Dagens Nyheter notes that the question mark in the title is well earned.
Familiar strengths, scattered argument
Beckman finds much that will be recognisable to Frid's readers, above all the language. She describes it as vivid and full of small, unexpected poetic turns that keep the prose energetic. Marianne's dark brown hair shines, in the novel's words as the reviewer quotes them, like a well-groomed pony decorated with prize rosettes, and her birthmark is red as fire engines or overripe tomatoes. The comic eye for people is also still present. Beckman singles out Eric's girlfriend Luisa, who does yoga, reads Joan Didion, shops at farmers' markets, drinks craft beer and loves rescue dogs.
The problem, in the reviewer's reading, is what Frid tries to do with the true crime form. Beckman sees the novel attempting to examine how contemporary culture is fixated on building stories around living people, in television series, documentaries, news and advertising. Eric pursues this constantly, trying to force the elusive Marianne into a coherent narrative. When Marianne finally gets a voice of her own, it comes in fragments and disconnected sentences, as scattered as people really are.
Beckman calls the theme timely and interesting but says it is not worked deeply enough into the book. The meta-discussion runs alongside the search for Marianne, with observations surfacing sometimes as irony and sometimes in earnest, and the result is too dispersed. The argument becomes messier still when the family is also described as another kind of story, an idea the review says is not developed either.
That is despite the family being exactly that, in Beckman's words: celebrated, mocked and turned into myth. She points to a moment when the novel's cool FBI agent, Jane Rizzo, punctures the idea, saying that people are not their families, did not choose them and need not choose them. Beckman suggests those words sit close to Frid herself.
What to watch
Beckman closes by saying that this time Frid does not manage to portray the strangeness between people as grippingly as she has before, but that she is certain the promising author will produce more clear-sighted stories. Readers can judge the novel for themselves now that it is out, and the review is available in full at Dagens Nyheter.
