"That's simultaneously the sweetest and the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a very long time, Anna-Lena."
Fredrik Backman’s debut novel, A Man Called Ove, is a bittersweet depiction of a lonely old man as he tries to come to terms with a world that's changing around him. The emotional moments worked great, but the humor–while generally effective–seemed forced at times.
Anxious People, Backman’s ninth novel, is, as the title clues us in, about anxious people. Or as a third person narrator often addresses them, idiots. “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.” A parent is anxious not to repeat their own parent’s mistakes, while spiraling down a path of no return. Another parent, having lost their spouse to death and daughter to drugs, is anxious about their son’s success. The son, in turn, is anxious about helping people. A person he helps grows up with the typical anxieties of Gen Z : global warming, animal preservation, the widening gap between the rich and the poor. A pregnant woman worries about the impracticality of her partner. An older woman stresses about her husband’s sense of self worth. These and other anxieties intertwine and culminate in a botched bank robbery and the unlikeliest of hostage situations.
Revealing anything more at all about Anxious People would be a disservice to the author, who couches every significant piece of information in a mystery and reveals them slowly. Sometimes infuriatingly so. As in A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman’s writing (ably aided by the translator Neil Smith) switches between being humorous and tugging your emotions. However, the problems I personally had in A Man Called Ove are present in Anxious People as well, and if anything, they are amplified. Both novels occasionally compromise consistency for the sake of humor. The interrogation scenes in Anxious People stick out as an example. A significant amount of suspension of disbelief is required to stomach some of the interactions between cops and witnesses in Anxious People. One of Backman’s favorite targets for mockery is the lifestyle of young people obsessed with social media. “Hand on heart, which of us hasn't wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?”, he remarks. The forced humor is one of my biggest gripes with Anxious People.
A smaller problem is that the writing is manipulative, but we realize that we are manipulated by an excellent craftsman. Art is manipulation, after all, and the level of subtlety one desires is subjective. Backman regularly uses misdirection and pulls the rug under our feet, and thereby controls the emotional flow. However, unlike in A Man Called Ove, the characters are not as well sketched out. We learn that a police officer is competent through another character who tells him. We learn that a man is not as bad as he seems when his wife explains why. We learn that a seemingly antisocial woman is concerned about everyday people, when she tells us so. A character called Roger resembles Ove. We initially see him as an older person with rigid views, until we learn that there is more to the man. But the subconscious association with Backman’s earlier work has more of a role to play in us sympathizing with Roger than anything he does in Anxious People.
Despite the faults, Anxious People resonates in parts. It deals with topics such as parenting, suicide, mental health, the destructive impact of modern financial systems on individuals, marriage, love and divorce. And loneliness. “I buy distance from other people… The most expensive things you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance”, remarks a character. Drug abuse is another topic Backman manages to deal with effectively. The narrator, who seems to be telling us often what the story is about, eventually offers what is probably the most accurate description of Anxious People : “Perhaps this is a story about a bridge”. Multiple inciting events in the story happen around a physical bridge. Anxious People is also about bridging the gap between people and overcoming our biases to look past people who we perceive as idiots. “Sometimes two strangers need only one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.”
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