Friendship (Gould) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
In Ms. Gould’s...often sharply observed first novel, Friendship...Amy and Bev have just crossed a microgenerational line into their 30s, and there’s a self-conscious, faintly melancholy tone to [the novel]: the girls’ sense of looking back on the turmoil (and, in Amy’s case, hubris) of their swiftly receding 20s with both alarm and nostalgia, worried that things are starting to add up, that the clock is ticking more loudly now, that the arithmetic of their lives is changing.... Depicting Amy and Bev in the third person gives Ms. Gould a measure of perspective on—and distance from—her characters, enabling her to depict their follies and foibles with a mixture of sympathy and humor. The novel form...also accentuates Ms. Gould’s strengths as a writer.... Whereas the blogs tended to create a self-portrait of the author as human word processor (automatically slicing, dicing and churning experience into prose), Friendship isn’t the simple spewing (or venting or whining or knee-jerk reacting) of an obsessive oversharer. Rather, at its best, it points to Ms. Gould’s abilities as a keen-eyed noticer and her knack for nailing down her ravenous observations with energy and flair.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Gould is holding up an ideal. Friendship, a slim, sometimes piercing novel, is a sharply observed chronicle of the inequality inherent in even the most valued friendships.
Alyssa Rosenberg - Washington Post


More than an exploration of friendship, this novel is about what happens when the things we take for granted slip away and we are forced to come up with new ways of being. For Amy and Bev, an unplanned pregnancy opens up a flood of questions that the women must wrestle with together, and, ultimately, individually.... Gould does a fine job capturing the women's frustrations, big and small, and the ways in which their friendship serves both as a hindrance and a means to maturing. But even if the writing is far superior to that commonly associated with commercial fiction, the novel's flippant tone—and the fact that it never really probes very far beneath the surface of what the characters are thinking—makes it read like a more highbrow version of chick lit. Call it literary chick lit.
Shoshana Olidort - Chicago Tribune


Gould’s strengths as a writer lie in her ability to portray contemporary women. Both main characters, who moved to Manhattan—well, Brooklyn—in order to conquer it often end up defeated.... Though Gould’s book is called Friendship it’s about much more than, as the main characters might say, BFFs. It’s about transitioning from idealistic youth to realistic adulthood, sacrificing freedom for stability, and abandoning creative lifestyles in order to craft sustainable lives.... Amy and Bev can be impulsive and oblivious. However, they’re recognizable to anyone who was ever told, as a child, that she could grow up to be anyone she wanted to be—and later struggled to figure out who that was.... Though Friendship is a modern tale astutely told, it offers the class-consciousness reminiscent of a Victorian novel.... Gould is a master of the telling detail or the ironic turn of phrase.... With Friendship, Gould establishes herself as a distinctively contemporary literary voice. Her dialogue resounds, and her dark humor gives texture to the prose. And though Friendship focuses on young women, readers need be neither young nor female in order to enjoy it.... This is a very human story for any of us who have ever been jealous of a friend or wished our friends were more jealous of us.
Christian Science Monitor


Work—sustained creativity, the problems of receiving too much attention, too fast and too young, paycheques, temp gigs, what it all might add up to and protect from—is as much a theme of the book as friendship is. The novel has a disarmingly for-real sense of these kinds of women’s lives, and features high-def, immersive verisimilitude about roommates, instant messages, storage units, job applications, buses, shirts, drinks and, largely, money; these are, of course, also the quotidian but hugely meaningful circumstances that create, maintain and end friendships, especially between women, especially in cities.... Adult female friendships act as load-bearing walls, but they’re also precarious: jealousy and judgments can rip them open in a day; errors in the careful balance sheet of neediness and interest in the other one’s day undo years of emotional work. ‘Sharply observed’ is a gross cliché, but Friendship is Gould seeing and understanding the small and mounting details of what women like her want, what they have to do to get it, and what they do to ruin everything. Gould’s first, best talent...is to see things as they are, like a craftsperson, like a writer of novels has to see them.
Kate Carraway - The Globe and Mail (Toronto)


There is a sentimental delight in reading Friendship and its roller coaster ride of urban highs and lows.... In the end, Gould draws a vivid and convincing portrait of a friendship—in all of its human misunderstandings, disappointments, and brokenness.... It is no small feat to animate and chart the emotional fluctuations and subtle contours of female friendships on the page.... [Gould] illuminate[s] what it means to grow up together and then sometimes apart.
S. Kirk Walsh - Virginia Quarterly Review


Gould’s novel is admirably, readably realistic—she knows these girls and the world they live in (including the omnipresence of technology and the way that it pervades relationships).... Gould nails the complex blend of love, loyalty, and resentment that binds female friends. It is worth reading for the richness of its details (at one point, Amy is overwhelmed by the desire to put an engaged coworker’s wedding ring in her mouth), and it offers new insight into the experience of young women.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Plot takes a back seat to Gould’s razor-sharp humor and observations about life in New York among a class of young people who know more about how they’d like to live than how to pay for it. It’s also a delight to read a novel that places female friendship at its center; we watch Bev and Amy manage their fluctuating feelings of love, jealousy and sometimes disdain for each other...[as] Gould brilliantly charts their ups and downs.
Kirkus Reviews