Liz's Reviews > Anxious People

5 big lovely stars!
“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 can forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”
Jack is having a really bad day. A police officer, he’s investigating a bank robbery that wasn’t a robbery, that led to a hostage situation and a missing perpetrator. The witness interviews all have a sense of “who’s on first?” to them. Well, his day might not be as bad as the bank robber’s, who might have been shot, but has gone missing and so who knows? “The bank robber undeniably had a point. Not that this is in any way defense. Bank robbers, they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty year old?”
This book is much more broadly humorous than his other works. But he still deals with all the important issues - the anxiety a parent feels worrying about a child, the anxiety one sibling has when another goes off the rails, the anxiety of being an adult, even the anxiety a stranger has for another soul in agony.
I love Backman’s way of looking at the world, his ability to express things so perfectly. “Suddenly, you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other.” I found myself highlighting all sorts of passages, big and small.
Backman employs an unknown narrator to talk to the reader, which works really well. The narrator actually empathizes not just with the characters, but with us, because we all share the same emotions, desires and needs. There are lots of laughs here, but also crying. Keep the hankies handy. I loved the ending and the twists that Backman used.
It’s especially poignant that Backman lost a friend to suicide and has suffered from panic attacks.
My thanks to netgalley and Atria Books for an advance copy of this book.

Update - reading this for book club and it’s equally impressive the second time around. And I love the way he has the narrator speak directly to the reader, like breaking through the fourth wall in plays.