Swedish author Fredrik Backman has entertained readers worldwide, drawing them into fictional realms with ordinary people facing the absurdities of life and death. In Anxious People, he mines similar terrain, cleverly assembling an ensemble cast of characters, some of them utterly exasperating. He sets them in a darkly comic predicament that will challenge them as a group and personally, opening the story to larger themes about the foibles, pitfalls and traps of living.
Backman's construct is straightforward: an open-house apartment viewing in "a not particularly large town" in Sweden on the day before New Year's Eve. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, especially when a 39-year-old gun-wielding bank robber targets a cashless bank and winds up, through a series of mishaps, at the open house. In bumbling, snowballing desperation, the robber takes eight people, high-maintenance strangers at the viewing, hostage. They include an eager real estate agent; an older married couple at odds with each other, who are interested in the apartment as an investment renovation project; a lesbian couple who are pregnant, first-time homebuyers; a jaded 80-year-old woman more concerned about her tardy husband, who is "parking the car," than the armed robber; a half-clothed man wearing an over-sized rabbit costume head complete with giant floppy ears; and a wealthy, socially isolated bank manager who recently started visiting open houses in an effort to come to grips with her life and its meaning. When the robber ultimately escapes, two police officers--a father and son facing personal struggles of their own--investigate the crime and try to make sense of the who, how and why of this topsy-turvy, totally-gone-awry robbery scenario and all involved.
Backman (Us Against You) skillfully employs an omniscient narrative voice and short, focused chapters that unwind an intricate plot through interspersed--extremely telling and very funny--police interrogation scenes. Readers are kept off-balance by details of the hostage siege as characters reveal their personal dilemmas. This intensifies the narrative tension and drama, upping the literal and figurative anxiousness of the book's title. Backman's signature storytelling wit and wisdom--the way he unravels his puzzle while peeling back layers of complex relationships, personal burdens and secrets carried by all--enables this fresh, quirky, over-the-top comedy to coalesce into poignant profundity. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Shelf Talker: This clever, dark comedy about human nature and relationships starts with a real estate open house that goes dreadfully awry when a bumbling armed bank robber shows up.