Lately I find that I often feel slightly out of touch with my
fellow man. What do you do with a book that opens with the author stating, “This
story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.”? I felt slapped in
the face and had an immediate and visceral reaction that pre-disposed me to
dislike the novel called “Anxious People.” My parents would have
punished us kids for even thinking about calling 
someone else an idiot. The bottom line
though is that I genuinely enjoyed this novel even as it broke my heart. Why? Because
it is overwhelmingly full of human beings, not so much anxious, as fearful of
what life has in store, fearful of failing, fearful of loneliness, fearful of
abandonment. In other words, a book for our times.
Touted as a comedic tour de force, there is little that I found funny in this novel. Poignant? Yes. Ironic? Sometimes. The premise is that a desperate robber with a toy gun tries to hold up a bank employee at a cashless facility. As the teller threatens to call the police, our thief, in a panic, runs through a back door, up a set of stairs, and walks right into a real estate open house in a small condominium complex. Before a word is uttered, assumptions are made, and our hapless robber suddenly has a hostage situation on his hands. The hours drag by, journalists, TV vans, cops, and onlookers gawk at the building as the folks inside settle in for an awkward meet and greet.
A retired couple who fill their days flipping properties and making money rather than do the hard work of communicating, a young couple expecting their first child and terrified that they won’t be good parents, and elderly woman waiting for her husband to park the car, an aloof banker, this disparate group spar, practice avoidance, and slowly open up over the course of an afternoon while Jim and Jack, a dysfunctional father/son duo of local police officers waiting for the big guns from Stockholm to arrive, decide to take matters into their own hands and learn wonderful new things about each other.
Author Fredrik Bachman makes no secret of his own high anxieties. A friend and I saw him present at a panel discussion in New York City and it felt painful to watch. For this reason, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that perhaps the gentleman doth protest too much. He may say he thinks they are idiots, but he loves his characters, each and every one. By the end of the novel, readers will love them too, for their insecurities, their frailties, their lack of self-awareness, but their willingness to face their demons.
Our discussion group last night was plagued by Zoom problems but in-between the annoyances we agreed on a few things. If you have never read Bachman before you may be put off by his choppy writing style and penchant for interspersing his own opinions into the tale. One member of our group made the spot-on recommendation that “Anxious People” would be better served if presented as a play. We all agreed though that the joy of this book is that, though written in Sweden about Swedes, the struggles of the characters, dealing with grief and possible self-harm, have universal reach, and we loved the way Bachman forced us repeatedly to face our own biases and assumptions.
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