PLGRM

Any time there is a new Tom Hanks project, I’m gonna squeal. But when I see that Tom Hanks is leading the cast of a movie based on a book by one of my favorite writers? Forget about it.

I’m a Fredrik Backman completist. I’ve read them all, and I’ve loved them all. Some more than others, to be sure, but I’ve read them all. (To be fair, I’ve read all the novels. There are a couple novellas that are Christmastime money grabs that I haven’t felt the need to attend to. Sue me.)

What I like about Backman is his propensity to write prose in a “dependent” way. There is an openness to his writing, an inviting quality. Here’s an excerpt from his 2019 book, Anxious People:

A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea.

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. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.

Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with 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 Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

One single really bad idea. That’s all it takes.

All the “ifs” and “sometimes” and “becauses” give the writing a forward lurching kind of feeling. You’re never bored reading Backman. Never.

Anxious People is probably my least favorite of his books, but that’s like saying Grape is my least favorite flavor of OtterPop. It’s still an OtterPop.

In order from my least favorite to most of his books:

• Anxious People – It just took longer to get into than I wanted. Once I was in, however… Whew.
• A Man called Ove – This is the book on which the new Hank’s flick is based. Heart wrenching and beautiful.
• My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry – I did not enjoy reading this book, but it was a masterpiece and I am so glad I did read it. Told from the POV of a 7 year old girl, I‘ve have never read a book that so completely inhabits the understanding of a particular human before. The way Backman not only writes with a 7 year old’s voice AND makes it so you and I can understand what’s going on? Come on. So good.
• Beartown – This was the first Backman book I read because it is, ostensibly, about Hockey. It is not about Hockey. I cannot tell you what it is about because that will ruin the book, but let’s just say that keeping secrets is bad.
• The Winners (Book 3 of the Beartown Trilogy) – This was a fitting close to the trilogy and the characters weve come to know in them. Solid. I’m glad I read it. Others are better.
• Us Against You (Book 2 of the Beartown Trilogy) – After what goes down in Beartown, this novel explores what is good and bad about human beings. How we are both things and neither.
• Britt-Marie Was Here – Britt-Marie is a character from My Grandmother…, and probably everyone’s least favorite. The way Backman shows us why a person might be as they are and teaches us to have compassion for those people in our lives who are “hard” is a lesson I will forever cherish.

RUN – don’t walk – to your nearest library and check out a copy of any of Backman’s books. You will not regret it.