THE TRIO

Three friends consider whether there's anything wrong with needing another person. 

As Hedman's debut opens, Frances, the daughter of Thora and August, calls Hugo, her mother’s former friend, an expatriate Swede teaching in New York, and asks to meet. The novel then jumps back in time, finding Hugo, who's in college in Stockholm, living in the apartment of Thora’s parents, members of the wealthy and morally dubious Stiller family. There, he meets Thora and August, inseparable friends since childhood. August is charming, his mood setting the tone of conversations, while Thora is often contrarian. Hugo is instantly enamored with both, admiring how they combine “ease” and “vulnerability.” Thora and August’s relationship is natural to them and an enigma to others: They are physically intimate but not exclusive. Thora defends their closeness by saying: “There’s nothing wrong with needing other people.” This philosophy is challenged when she develops feelings for Hugo, who has trouble distinguishing his emotions from the facade he projects for others. August, the lone member of the trio who doesn’t narrate, is sincere yet opaque; we learn about him through his confessions to the others. Each is on the cusp of choosing a career, engaged in the surrealism of playacting adulthood. The language is often pleasantly surprising, as when Thora says, “I liked the way the real world crackled when filtered through the legal method,” or conversation “moved forward by way of tender linguistic abuses.” But as Hugo and Thora continue to falter on the question of who they are—with Hugo feeling that “everything was a pose” and Thora thinking “every single adjective could be used to describe her, and they’d all be equally true and untrue”—the tension behind their listlessness falters.

Hedman's descriptions delight, but interest wanes as her characters perform the same poses again and again.