Anxious People (2020)
By Fredrik Backman
Atria Books, 336 pages.
★★★★
This is a story about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.
Who, other than Fredrik Backman, could write such words without irony? From the time A Man Called Ove was translated into English in 2013, to his latest, Anxious People, he has been unparalleled in his ability to make us see profundity in simple things while making us laugh at idiots. The joke, of course, is on us. The content of Anxious People is encapsulated in its title, though Backman could have easily subtitled it “A Cross-Section of Humanity.”
What’s it about? It’s about a man standing on a bridge, though Backman encourages us to, “Think about something nicer. Think about cookies.” It’s about a bank robbery and a slogan-spouting realtor. Plus, a hostage crisis, bumbling small-city cops, hostile witnesses, and how “Stockholmer” is code for everything from pushiness to gayness. It’s about how, “We lie to those we love.” And a whole lot more, including “truth,” a word that needs to be enclosed by quotation marks.
The skinny is that someone who never planned to rob a bank is pushed to levels of desperation so deep that this individual ends up trying to stick up a cashless outlet. To compound matters, the bank robber blunders into taking hostages because, well… it’s complicated. To add further confusion, none of the hostages recall much of anything specific about the about the robber or the experience of being a hostage. And what a collection of “victims” they are.
London was the bank teller in question, though she is filled more with attitude than answers. The realtor showing the apartment where the hostages were taken is even less useful, except to opine that the robber’s gun was a toy. And these are the good witnesses!
Add to the mix a nasty misanthropic female investment banker, a retired couple who go to apartment showings and badmouth the properties so they can pick them up cheaply and flip them, a lesbian couple about to have a baby but seem to have nothing in common, a surprise interloper who locks himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and an 87-year-old woman who is akin to a storybook grandmother. Try getting useful information from that lot.
The novel’s post-release interviews are hysterical and the reaction of the father/son police team trying to crack the case is a close second on the laugh scale. (Who sends pizza to a hostage taker?) This is a whodunit in which not even the victims seem to know or care who did it. They’re not even sure what “it” was. One of the mysteries is what happened to the realtor when the bank robber was waving a gun? (No, she wasn’t the gunman!) Why even tell us about a man on a bridge, an episode that occurred a decade earlier?
If you know anything about Backman, you know that his surfaces are set ups for deeper things lurking inside human psyches. That’s why he titled this book Anxious People. You also know that Backman is not a misanthrope; he loves people despite their mistakes, sticks, foibles, and flummoxes. Nor is he afraid to count himself among the “idiots.” Several moving things will happen in Anxious People before all is resolved, and I doubt very much you will anticipate them.
The previous paragraph suggests something that’s very special about Fredrik Backman. All writing is difficult, which is why most mysteries are either Pink Panther-like farces, or as hardboiled as Robert Parker’s head. Some in the latter vein contain wisecracks and snaps, but how many mysteries have you read that rocket you from disgust to empathy to gales of laughter to moist-eyed emotional release? Who else writes about the gun-toting hostage-takers and makes you feel uplifted by the tale? If you surmise from all of this that I am one of Backman’s biggest fans, I wouldn’t exactly call you Sherlock Holmes Junior, but you’re right. Anxious People is Backman’s eighth full-length novel, and in my estimation seven of them or literary gems. I anxiously await his ninth.
Rob Weir
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