I was delighted by A Man Called Ove, both the book and the film. Since then, I’ve tried some of Mr. Backman’s other books but none were nearly as good. So I opened Anxious People with a bit of dread — please be good, please be good I muttered to myself. (Don’t you talk to your books? I do, as few else listen.)
Now, you should know it has taken me forever to write up my thoughts of this widely popular and best-selling novel.
You see, I had trouble with Anxious People, yet enjoyed much of it. The plot is crazy, but the characters are wonderfully flawed and complex. It leaps all over the place in time, and yet comes together in the end — so I have no clear opinion on this book. I’ll do my best to give you an overview and let you decide whether to try this wacky tale.
From the book’s publicity:
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world.
The police aren’t having a good day either. Father and son officers, Jim the old hand and Jack preferring modern methods, make up most of the small police force in their small town. They’re not used to bank robbers or handling hostage situations.
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Anxious People immediately plunges the reader into this preposterous event told from multiple points of view. This makes for a complex start, and at first, everyone and everything was disjointed. There are many characters — each with their own stories.
During the first 100 pages, I wondered where this story was going — and if I would continue reading — but soon it started to come together. The somewhat stereotypical characters soon emerge as much more. These characters, although wonderfully developed, are for the most part idiots — but amusing idiots.
And here’s what Mr. Backman says about idiots — this definition applies to pretty much all of us —
“This story is 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.”
Anxious People jumps around in the timeline and swerves off on a lot of tangents, but it all makes sense in the end and all those little tangents soon become important. It was at times funny, at times sad, but for me, the best part was how it handled difficult topics in a way that was deservedly serious and yet lighthearted.
I found it was worth working through some of the convolution just for the some of the wisdom alone. I’ll give you a few samples of Mr. Backman’s insights:
“Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim.”
And then there is this one which spoke to me:
“The truth, of course, is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit. Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.”
And here the author speaks to anxiety – this quote deserves reading more than once.
“One of the most human things about anxiety is that we try to cure chaos with chaos. Someone who has got themselves into a catastrophic situation rarely retreats from it, we’re far more inclined to carry on even faster. We’ve created lives where we can watch other people crash into the wall but still hope that somehow we’re going to pass straight through it. The closer we get, the more confidently we believe that some unlikely solution is miraculously going to save us, while everyone watching us is just waiting for the crash.”
So perhaps this is a story about a hostage situation, filled with anxious people. Or perhaps this is a tale of idiots stuck in an apartment. Or maybe it’s about a bungled police investigation. And then there’s the bridge…
But I have come to the long awaited conclusion that Anxious People is all about human relationships, of which Mr. Backman is a master. I laughed, I sighed, and I often savored the writing – re-reading many passages. There is wisdom sprinkled throughout the narrative.
Anxious People is not an easy read – it takes some letting yourself just “go with the flow” of this screwball novel and its anxious, idiotic — yet fascinating characters.
I’ll leave you with one last conversation:
So Zara asked, without any sarcasm, “Have you learned any theories about why people behave like that, then?”
“Hundreds,” The psychologist smiled.
“Which one do you believe?”
“I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
Trigger warning: This novel deals with suicide and attempted suicide.
A digital review copy was kindly provided by Atria Books via NetGalley
