Breaking: Fredrik Backman, not IKEA, is Sweden’s best export

Thoughts on Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, and “quirky” humor

A few weeks ago, a video of Fredrik Backman’s speech at the Simon & Schuster centennial made the rounds on TikTok. “Being a writer,” he deadpans, “is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane.”¹ The Swedish author’s wit and earnestness captivated me so much that I knew I had to read one of his books. I downloaded a sample of his latest novel, Anxious People, because it sounded truly insane: a bank robbery gone awry results in the weirdest hostage drama you’ve ever read, where no one wants to be in this situation and no one knows what they’re doing—least of all the cops and lone gunman.

The opening chapter had the same sardonic tone as Backman’s speech; he writes,

“[It’s] idiotically difficult being a human … these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn WiFi.”²

Right now I’m finding it particularly idiotically difficult to be a human. As I write, I’m planted across a table from my husband at my hometown’s local coffee shop chain to pass the time. We were sick of the soulless small town we’d been living in ten hours away from here, so with our lease renewal approaching, we decided to start looking at jobs closer to our families. And now we’re here, in Kentucky, staying with my family while our stuff sits in storage waiting to be moved into an apartment once one of us lands a job. So yeah, I’m a little anxious right now!

Backman has a great talent for leveraging humor to make discussions of mental health accessible; he achieves this by blending archetypal characters with a strong narratorial presence. To some negative Goodreads reviewers, this made his characters seem annoying, narrator too wordy, and the “quirky” and “whimsical” humor miss the mark. Obviously, I disagree.

Backman balances realism and hyperbole from moment to moment to keep the writing from growing stale. Take these two moments featuring the same pair of characters, Jack and Jim:

[Jim] cleared his throat and turned away as he took out his phone. He stood there for a good while, hoping he wasn’t going to be asked what he was doing. He was, of course.

“Dad…,” Jack said over his shoulder.

“Mmm,” Jim said.

“Are you seriously googling ‘what you should do in a hostage situation’?”

“I might be.”³

When [Jim] sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: “I’ve tried talking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick?”

Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad.⁴

The oppositional tone of these two scenes mirrors the technique of classic writers like Jane Austen and Shakespeare; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s goofiness offsets Hamlet suicidal melodrama, and Mrs. Bennet’s hysterics offset the dire narrative about the financial dependence of women. These writers knew, like Backman knows, that we can only take so much darkness in one sitting.

And, honestly, I just feel like these his characters are totally realistic. We all know these people:

• The career woman who has needlessly sacrificed her wellbeing for success;

• The empty-nesters struggling to relate to one another without the uniting force of their children;

• The single mom who would do anything for her kids;

• The pregnant woman who just needs to pee, damnit;

• And the actor with a strange side hustle.

These characters might be caricatures of real people, but they have their depth to them. Goofy humor does not make a novel any less “serious” as a piece of literature.

Anxious People is a book that entered my life at the perfect time. “We don’t have a plan,” Backman writes, “we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”⁵ My entire life right now feels like it’s just getting through the day. Save this book for when you’re in that situation too, because we all are, at one point or another.

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Experience of reading: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Literary style/“value”: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Trigger warnings: suicide, gun violence, loss & grief, references to substance abuse

1

Fredrik Backman, “Fredrik Backman on Creative Anxiety and Procrastination,” Simon & Schuster Books, 00:53.

2

Fredrick Backman, Anxious People (New York: Atria Books, 2020), 1, Kindle.

3

Ibid, 51.

4

Ibid, 201.

5

Ibid, 2.