The Winners: A Novel for the Stanley Cup!

 

THE WINNERS: BEARTOWN #3 (2022)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 688 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

I nearly skipped The Winners because I felt that three books about ice hockey in two Swedish towns was one too many. Send me to the penalty box for tripping. I should have known that Fredrik Backman would deke when I thought he was grinding. The Winners is a must read during the Stanley Cup playoffs, but you don’t need to know a Zamboni from tagliatelle to appreciate all three Beartown novels.

 

The Winners returns us to an isolated forested section of Sweden where the residents of Beartown and Hed simply hate each other. Though their economic survivals are inextricably linked, there’s little they won’t do to express their mutual disgust–rumbles between rival gangs, workplace antagonism, political machination–but the hockey rink is where the rivalry becomes the Crusades on skates.   

 

Backman picks up the narrative two years from where he left off in Book # 2, Us Against You. That book involved an assault that ripped apart Beartown, but it also paved the way for its reversal of fortune. Hed had always been the more prosperous town and usually prevailed on ice, but the pendulum has swung to Beartown, with its new businesses, expensive new homes, a star player (Amat), and a newly refurbished rink, whereas the roof of Hed’s rink has collapsed, a symbol of its overall decline.

 

Backman readers have previously met the Andersson family, former NHL player-turned-Beartown-general manager Peter, his lawyer wife Kira, and offspring Maya and Leo. Maya is now studying music in Stockholm, Peter is at sea after giving up the GM job, and Leo is AWOL in video game stocked room. Other Beartown fixtures have their own concerns. Amat is overweight from an injury, drink, and ennui; Benji left town to escape the homophobes; former golden boy Kevin has departed to parts unknown; Tails is engaged in all manner of dodgy schemes; Ramona is running out of steam; Ekisabeth Zackell remains a brilliant hockey coach with the personality of particle board; and Ana, Maya’s BFF, is mired in sadness and anger. Oddly, Peter and local thug Teemu have grown friendly, but the only happy campers in Beartown are Bobo, now an assistant coach; former coach Sune; and young Alicia, who might be the future face of Beartown hockey.

 

Backman introduces new characters, including junkyard mogul Lev, who is either a gangster or just a terrible agent. Backman parallels the Anderrssons with a Hed family—firefighter Johnny, his midwife spouse Hannah, and their four children (Tess, Toby, Ted, and Ture). Ted, though still in juniors, could be Hed’s equivalent of Amat. There is also a new editor in Hed who is being fed information by her furtive father that threatens Beartown hockey; Theo, a local politician even sleazier than Tails; a silent goalie plucked from Hed nicknamed Mumble; Aleksandr, a Bears recruit of unspecified ethnicity; a dog named Bang!; and Matteo, a poor kid from Beartown who grew up in a fundamentalist family and missing his sister Ruth, whose fate provides the novel’s crisis point.

 

You might think that a devastating windstorm would bring Beartown and Hed together, but hatred is so intense that even junior hockey is pretext for violence, and neither can desist from all manner of underhanded plots. Mostly, both towns adhere to the same standard they hold for killing wolves: “Shoot. Dig. Silence.” The novel’s’ most profound moments come when fate does bring them together. One involves social class realities. In Beartown it’s the impoverished Hollow versus the new-money Heights; in Hed, it’s the schemers versus the working-class.

 

My initial thought was that The Winners took too long to get serious. I still think that, but the last third of the book is deeply moving. Backman takes us into living rooms, bars, workplaces, campgrounds, and frozen sheets where unbridled play prevails. It’s also where a lot of Backman’s foreshadowing comes into the light, including the famed Chekov’s gun literary device. Backman’s technique reminds me of the late John Prine’s musical repertoire: he makes us laugh one moment, shake our heads at absurdity the next, but moves us to tears when we least expect it.

 

The wrap-up coda went by too fast and was (often) too neat. Yet when Backman writes, “Maya’s story could easily have ended the same ways as Ruth’s story,” we know what he means. If you can avoid a lump in your throat upon discovery, you’re made of sterner stuff than I. Would it have been a stronger 400-page book? Probably, but it’s a bloody good one at 688.

 

Rob Weir