The Answer Is No by Fredrik Backman

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on December 1, 2024

Love is not for the selfish. Fortunately for Lucas, he is happy to be selfish and doesn’t care about being unloved. Lucas believes that “responsibility” and “commitment” are “two of the easiest ways of ruining any perfectly good day.” Lucas prefers to be free to do what he wants when he wants without considering the competing desires of other people. He also understands the danger of starting conversations. “If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that’s how wars start.”

Narrating “The Answer Is No,” Lucas tells the reader that there is something perfect about not having to share a pint of ice cream. He recommends “being really content with your life and not immediately thinking: Wow, now everything is really perfect, maybe we should have a baby?” Because a baby introduces another person in your life, and other people are the source of all unhappiness.

It's not that Lucas dislikes other people. He just has no need to interact with them. He appreciates the people who cook his pad thai and those who deliver it to his door, but he is happier if he doesn’t need to speak with them. To those who maintain that humans are herd animals who need to be together, he counters that “humans have historically proved to be in-need-of-therapy animals,” the need for therapy being triggered by keeping company with other humans.

Lucas likes to be left alone so he can drink wine and play video games. He feels sorry for people who want something to happen in their lives. Lucas “lives in an apartment, which he would consider the perfect form of storage for people, were it not for the great virus of civilization: neighbors.” His default response when a neighbor wants something is to tell them no.

Some of Lucas’ neighbors want him to help solve the mystery of a frying pan that a tenant discarded outside — almost on the sidewalk! — and Lucas has just managed to talk them into going away when his downstairs neighbor appears. She’s upset that he changed his internet password and is affronted when he accuses her of stealing his internet. It isn’t stealing, after all, if she only takes the little bit of the internet that leaks into her apartment.

Craziness ensues, primarily in the form of a large and ever-growing junk pile that originated with the frying pan, a committee of three crazy residents who place Lucas in charge of the pile, and a group of men who worship Lucas because they are convinced he is an angel. Eccentric people are Fredrik Backman’s bread and butter, the kind of people who make random comments like “I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I’m capable of!” Other characters, like a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by pretending to be in a coma, are more poignant. Backman also pokes fun at official and unofficial bureaucrats, protestors, middle managers, Facebook groups, and self-help advice.

Lucas might not be a reader’s ideal neighbor, but he sometimes expresses wise thoughts, including his recognition that some people are more interested in blaming and punishing people for the problems they cause (like a discarded frying pan) than in solving the problems (by, for example, picking up the frying pan). When the lone frying pan turns into a pile of trash (it’s easier to break the rules when someone else has paved the way), everyone in the neighborhood tries to guess at the culprits’ identities, “which somehow always seem to be people who don’t look like the people who are doing the guessing.”

Naturally, Lucas will feel himself making connections as the story progresses. He might despise himself for behaving socially, he might feel feverish as he comes down with a case of empathy, but working together with neighbors helps him solve some problems (although yes, other people are always the problem). But that doesn’t mean that Lucas needs to change his entire philosophy of life. His final plan to avoid responsibility and commitment is fitting and funny.

This is a short story, but sufficiently long — and sufficiently entertaining — that readers in need of a laugh might not feel bad about paying a couple of bucks to enjoy it.

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Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

First published in Sweden in 2019; published in translation by Atria Books on September 8, 2020

Anxious People is a novel about a bank robbery that triggers a hostage drama. But no, it’s really a novel about a desperate man who jumps from a bridge and a desperate girl who doesn’t. But no, it’s not really about any of that. Fredrik Backman tells us that Anxious People is about idiots because that’s what we all are: idiots who are doing the best we can. Anxious People is a sweet, unpredictable, laugh-out-loud story of diverse individuals who begin to overcome their anxieties by recognizing the need to let go of the past while embracing a more compassionate future.

Abandoned by a spouse who had an affair and desperate for money to avoid eviction and an ensuing loss of child custody, a parent makes the unfortunate decision to rob a bank. The robbery is futile because the robber unwittingly chooses a cashless bank. The fleeing robber dashes through the nearest door and up a light of stairs where a realtor is showing an apartment. By wielding a gun that the robber assumes to be a toy, a hostage situation begins. Or maybe not, because the robber doesn’t want to frighten anyone and taking hostages was never part of the plan.

The story is driven by the quirky personalities of each person attending the apartment showing. From time to time we also encounter Jim and Jack, police officers who are father and son. Backman mixes in transcripts of Jack’s interviews with the hostages after they are released. None of the hostages are particularly good at being interviewed, but they are quite good at infuriating Jack. The interviews digress into silliness that makes a strong contribution to the story’s merriment.

As the title suggests, the characters are anxious. A couple of them are anxious to buy the apartment, but all are anxious in the sense of experiencing anxiety. They seem to be concerned about how others perceive them, taking political correctness to extremes for fear of being seen as prejudiced when they discuss gay people — except for Julia and Ro, lesbians who are expecting a child. They argue constantly, perhaps because they enjoy making up.

Competing against Julia and Ro for the apartment are Roger and Ana-Lena, an older couple who may be together as a function of habit rather than connection. Roger is obsessively competitive (he makes money by flipping apartments) while Ana-Lena feels the need to explain what Roger means every time Roger speaks.

Lennart appears in the story after he is forced out of the apartment’s bathroom because Julia needs to use it. Lennart has no pants but is wearing a rabbit head. Despite his unconventional attire, Lennart is probably the story’s most idealistic character. Apartments typically come up for sale because of death or divorce, but Lennart believes there’s something romantic about all the apartments that aren’t for sale. It is possible to imagine that they are occupied by happy couples.

Zara and Estelle have each attended the showing for reasons unrelated to a desire to purchase the property. Estelle is an older woman learning to live without her husband, a man who was everything to her despite having little in common with her. Zara, a prosperous banker who annoys her therapist, is acerbic and judgmental, making it no surprise that she’s lonely. Zara is surprised to discover a connection between her therapist and one of the other characters.

Jim and Jack love each other, as father and son should, but don’t know how to express it, as fathers and sons almost never do. Jack is among the characters who have been touched by the man who jumped from the bridge ten years earlier. Jack became a cop with the noble purpose of saving people, but it is up to his father to teach Jack that making an arrest isn’t always the best way to save someone.

The hostage drama triggers empathy in each of the characters, all of whom have at some point been frightened and lost, all of whom felt anxiety before the robber appeared. We live in a world we share with strangers who harbor the same anxieties. We brush against each other and, as Backman illustrates, we have an impact on each other in ways we may never understand.

Each character in Anxious People makes a bit of progress toward anxiety relief, because one bit at a time is all that anyone can manage. We start by admitting that there’s “an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest,” and by recognizing that other people feel the same way. We try to internalize the belief that things we blame ourselves for are not always our fault. We make an effort to understand other people and to care about them, even if they are not like us, because caring about others is essential to caring about ourselves.

Letting go of negativity and all the unimportant things that anchor us might create anxiety in the form of uncertainty, but not knowing what happens next is a good starting point from which to build a better life. If we are nothing more than the sum of our experiences, Backman says, we could not live with ourselves. “We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” Sometimes we need someone to give us a second chance. Sometimes we need to give ourselves one.

Backman keeps the reader guessing about the bank robber’s fate. Will the robber escape and, if so, how? Backman dangles possibilities to make the reader think “I know how the robber escapes” before foreclosing them. So there’s an element of mystery, but the plot exists largely to frame the characters and to showcase their anxieties and the lessons they learn. And to make the reader laugh, a goal Backman accomplishes on every page.

I suppose there’s a degree of sappiness in the self-help advice that Backman offers, but the story is told with so much heart and humor that even the most cynical reader should be able to embrace it. Whether or not a reader appreciates Backman’s lessons, it would be difficult to dislike the characters or to avoid laughing at them in recognition that they are, like us, idiots who are doing the best they can.

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