Us Against You

What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.

“Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.”

“The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.”

“People driving through say that Beartown doesn’t live for anything but hockey, and some days they may be right. Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else.”

“Unfortunately, that isn’t what we’re going to remember in a few years’ time. Many of us will just look back on these months and remember … the hatred. Because that’s how we function, for better or worse: we always define different periods by their worst moments. So we will remember two towns’ loathing for each other. We will remember the violence, because it’s only just started. Of course we won’t talk about it; we don’t do that here. We’ll talk about hockey games that were played instead, so that we don’t have to talk about the funerals that took place between them.”

“Violence is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to understand. Some of us are prepared to use it to get power, others only in self-defense, some all the time, others not at all. But then there’s another type, unlike all the others, who seems to fight entirely without purpose. Ask anyone who has looked into a pair of those eyes when they turn dark, and you’ll realize that we belong to different species. No one can really know if those people lack something that other people possess or if it’s the other way around. If something goes out inside them when they clench their fists or if something switches on.”

“It’s always the aggressors’ feelings we have to defend. As if they’re the ones who need our understanding.”

“Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. Because sometimes it’s so easy to make people hate one another that it feels incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.”

“But children are the only people who don’t have to take responsibility for anyone but themselves. The rest of us have to take responsibility for the things we cause to happen. You’re a leader. People follow you. So frankly, if you can’t take responsibility for the actions of your followers, that makes you nothing but a monster.”

Seriously, major spoiler.
From Beartown: “Amat, Zacharias, Bobo, and Benjamin: two have just turned sixteen, two will soon be turning eighteen. In ten years’ time two of them will be playing professionally. One will be a dad. One will be dead.”

From Us Against You, heartbreakingly: “In ten years’ time, Amat will be a professional player, playing in huge arenas. Zacharias will be a pro as well, but in front of a computer. Bobo will be a father.”

Clearly, this makes you think that Benji, volatile and careless with his life, trained to be a menace on and off the ice by the expectations of adults who love piling too-heavy responsibilities on shoulders too young to carry them; hurt and angry and yet starkly moral and amazingly resilient Benji Ovich, a young man who knows that ever since he was outed in a vengeful act despite his gentle kindness, he will always have to prove himself above and beyond to ever be even somewhat accepted in Beartown, will not live past 10 years, the ripe old age of 28.

But what I’m banking on is Backman’s trademark misdirection at play here. Otherwise I refuse to accept it. Not Benji. Dear Fredrik Backman, I’m warning you — Benji is off limits. Benji needs happiness. And not just for 10 years. Mr. Backman, consider yourself warned.

“In the end an eighteen-year-old man is left standing outside an ice rink thinking “Who can I be, if I’m not this?”