US AGAINST YOU (2018)
By Fredrik Backman
Atria Books, 435
pages.
★★★
How do you feel about sequels? If you see them as the next
chapter of an ongoing tale, you’ll like Fredrik Backman’s Us Against You. If you think they are recycling, you might not.
Backman came from nowhere with A Man Called Ove in 2012, and quickly made his way onto my reading
list. His 2015 My Grandmother Told Me to
Tell You She’s Sorry is one of the most magical books I’ve read since
childhood. I wasn’t quite as enamored of Beartown
(2016), but it grabbed me about halfway through. If you’ve not read Beartown, don’t read Us Against You until you do, as it’s
most assuredly a sequel and you'll need Beartown’s
background and character development. Even then you may come away with the
impression that maybe a sequel wasn’t needed.
There are three major takeaways from Us Against You: Backman really loves hockey, rural Sweden is more
violent than you imagine, and Backman thinks that family and community matter
at least as much as hockey. Us Against
You returns to Beartown, a postindustrial working-class town in a remote
part of Sweden. It’s a place of hard times and hard people, unlike the nearby
town of Hed, which is middle class and more prosperous. Those who stay in
Beartown share the perspective of the mother of a talented hockey player:
“Fatima loved the people here because they didn’t try to pretend that the world
was uncomplicated. Life is tough, it hurts and people admitted that.” About all
the town has going for it is a great hockey program and, if you’ve read Beartown, you know that even that isn’t
as good as the one in Hed and is in severe crisis.
As we come into Us
Against You, it looks as if the Beartown and Hed squads will be
consolidated as one–in Hed, of course. You’ll meet the same cast of characters:
Hog, Tails, Sune, Ramona, Amat, Bobo, The Pack, and Benji and his sisters. At
its center is the Andersson family: Kira, a lawyer; Peter, the general manager
of the town’s hockey clubs; 12-year-old Leo; and 16-year-old Maya. Maya was
central to Beartown, but now her
plight has split the town. Some blame her for the impending demise of the
hockey club; others are royally ripped that she’s being treated so inhumanely.
The pressures on the Andersson’s marriage is acute, Leo is growing up lean and
mean, and Maya increasingly withdraws into her music and her friendship with
Ana. Packing boxes mysteriously appear on the Andersson property, and phone
calls from moving firms they’ve not contacted disturb their privacy.
Possible salvation arrives in the form of an ambitious
politician, Richard Theo. He’s as oily as a sardine factory, but he has an enticing
plan that will save the hockey team and bring new jobs to Beartown. This leaves
Peter with the task of trying to reassemble a dispersed hockey team and defeat
Hed in the process. The complication is that he must rein in The Pack, a group
of local toughs who stand at hockey games like a Norse version of the Hell’s
Angels. That’s daunting enough, but the fact that Peter would have to break his
word sets up the classic dilemma between being safe and honest, or aligning
with power and paying the cost to keep the hockey program.
If you are tempted to shout out, “Oh for heaven’s sake. It’s
just a bloody game,” the only part you’d be right about is the blood. You’ll
meet a few new characters such as a tough-as-iron female hockey coach named
Elizabeth Zackell, and Vidar Rinnius, a brilliant goalie who is the troubled
younger brother of Teemu, the thuggish linchpin of The Pack. This novel isn’t
what you imagine about Sweden and violence. You might also be shocked by what
passes for okay among the adolescent males. In Us Against You, we confront situations that are as volatile as a
dry forest. It won’t take much for things to ignite. Damage will be done to the
degree that we must wonder if redemption is possible.
The central question is whether we the readers are convinced
that hockey is a profound metaphor for life. I love the sport, but it was a struggle
to freight hockey with as much symbolism as Backman infers. Part of me wanted
to cast the book aside as a problematic sequel what was already the weakest
thing Backman has written. I continued because Backman has a knack for tossing
off simple-yet-profound insights that make their way into the mouths of his
characters. Why might someone distrust men in suits? Because people with
ambition and money, “never love anything, they just own things.” Or how about
this bon mot from Leo: “… people will always choose a simple lie over a
complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth
always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be
easy to believe.” Ouch!
How then to evaluate Us
Against You? Maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I see it as a
really great mediocre offering. It is, however, time for Backman to turn his
attention to other matters. This is his third sports-based novel and even the
best metaphors break if you flex them too often.
Rob Weir
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