Literature / Anxious People

Anxious People is a 2020 comedy-drama novel by Fredrik Backman, of A Man Called Ove and Beartown.

It was the day before New Years' Eve. Six strangers—Zara, Julia, Ro, Roger, Anna-Lena, and Estelle—had gathered for an apartment viewing, for varying reasons. It was looking to be a very uneventful day in a very uneventful town.

Then a bank robber ran into the apartment, brandishing a gun. The apartment viewing had become a hostage situation.

As for how the hostage situation went, that's what father and son police officers Jim and Jack are trying to figure out. All they know is that whoever the bank robber is, they were gone by the time the police arrived, seemingly vanished.

The novel slowly unravels the mystery not just of the vanishing robber, but of what transpired in the apartment that no one else was there to see. Along with this mystery, the story explores the relationships between the characters, their reasons for being in the apartment in the first place, and the way the experience changes them.

Anxious People contains the following tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Julia confesses to Anna-Lena and Estelle that her father was very abusive to her mother, but that her mother somehow kept loving him despite it.
• Bait-and-Switch: Anna-Lena tells Julia a story of how Roger once heard a politician on the news say that immigrants were coming into the country and taking everything as they pleased, and that later the same day Roger had an immigrant ask him for his parking spot at the mall. He sat in the spot for twenty minutes, "out of principle." Julia cuts her off, not wanting to hear about Roger's prejudices, but Anna-Lena clarifies: Roger stayed put for twenty minutes because that's how long it took for the immigrant to make it to the spot. He didn't want the immigrant to see Roger and be reminded of the politician on TV.
• Black Comedy: Both the dialogue and the narration is rife with with it, but special mention goes to Ro confessing to the others that she doesn't think she'll be a good parent. She tells them that when she was babysitting a child once, he told her his tummy hurt at lunchtime. She told him that it was his butterfly wings trying to grow, and that he needed food to help them. The bank robber thinks it's adorable.
  Ro: It turned out to be acute appendicitis.
  Bank robber: Oh.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Estelle's story of the man she had an emotional affair with ends with him giving her a key to his apartment, which she never did use. It's revealed that the apartment for sell is Estelle's, and the man lived in the apartment just across the hall. The key has been in the bookshelf the whole time, and allows the bank robber to hide while the police investigate the complex.
  • The phone, albeit we learn of this in anachronistic order. While delivering the pizzas, Jim placed a phone in one of the boxes to try and talk to the bank robber. It was later forgotten about, and left behind on a table. The phone later ringing causes it to vibrate, knocking the gun off the same table and making it fire. The sound (along with the stage blood on the floor) gave Jim and Jack the impression that the robber shot himself.'
• Cope by Pretending: Towards the end of the book, it's revealed that Estelle's husband, Knut, is not just parking the car. He's been dead for some time. She tells herself lies like this sometimes to deal with the loneliness.
• Deadpan Snarker: Virtually the only way Zara knows how to communicate. There's not a single scene in the book's entirety wherein she doesn't snark at someone—and this snark doesn't even diminish slightly when she's taken hostage by the bank robber.
• Didn't Think This Through: The bank robber, utterly desperate, plans to rob exactly 6,500 kronor from a local bank just to pay off one month's rent—after, the bank robber intends to return it all, but without a plan as to how to do that. The narration itself tells the reader to give the robber some leniency, as the situation was so overwhemingly dire it would be impossible for anyone to think straight.
• Foreshadowing
  • During one of his witness interviews, Jack refers to the bank robber as a male, prompting the question of, "What, only men can be bank robbers?" This throwaway line practically gives a later "twist" to the reader on a silver platter: the bank robber is, in fact, a woman. It's very easy to miss, but the narration never refers to the bank robber as "he" or "him," just "the bank robber." This also sets up the Red Herring that the real estate agent may be the bank robber, which turns out to be untrue.
  • While she, Anna-Lena, and Julia are in the closet, Estelle snoops through a chest and finds bottles of wine. She tells the girls that she would do the same in her own home. It is Estelle's home. This is also shown in how confident Estelle is that there is still food in an apartment being shown for sale.
• For Want Of A Nail: At the beginning of the novel, the reader is told how the bank robber came to be a bank robber. Homeless and desperate, the bank robber had to steal blankets from a neighbor's outside boxes, alongside what was thought to be a toy pistol. The bank robber kept the pistol just for show, should protection ever be needed. It turns out that not only was the pistol not fake, but it was hidden by someone who was intending to actually rob a bank.
• Happily Married: Estelle and her husband, Knut. She tells Julia and Anna-Lena that she and Knut never got over "the first flush of infatuation," and spent their many married years together in utter bliss. Estelle admits to an emotional affair with another man, but not even slightly because of any lacking in her own marriage—the man just had an interest of hers that Knut didn't. Estelle loves Knut so deeply that she lies to herself and the others that he's not in the apartment because he was parking the car—he died some years prior to the story.
• Mistaken for Cheating: Roger assumes (after thinking him to be more competition for the apartment) that Lennart is Anna-Lena's affair partner, hence her crying and his saying, "We're together." The truth upsets him almost as much: Lennart is an actor that Anna-Lena has regularly hired to distrupt apartment viewings to lower the competition, trying to make sure that Roger "wins."
• My Greatest Failure
  • The cold and callous Zara has been haunted for several years by something she once did as a bank owner: she told a man that his crippling loss in a crash was his own fault for giving the bank his money to begin with. The man comitted suicide by throwing himself off the town bridge, and left Zara a letter before he did so. Zara has been carrying the unread letter around for years, and goes to apartment viewings solely to look out at the bridge, forcing herself to remember what she did. She finally gets some closure when she actually reads what the letter says: "It wasn't your fault."
  • Jack's desperation to be the hero stems from the very same man: Jack found him on the bridge and failed to talk him out of jumping.
• No Name Given: Even in the epilogue, the bank robber's name is never given. It is only ever "the bank robber."
• Opposites Attract: The cold and callous Zara starts a relationship with the goofy but kind-hearted Lennart sometime after the hostage situation.
• Together in Death: Thanks to talking to the others, Estelle comes out of the hostage situation closer to terms with her husband's death, albeit she still misses him dearly. The epilogue tells the reader that Estelle is together with Knut in Heaven, alongside the man she would swap books with.
• Unusual Euphemism: Estelle uses "(going to/being from) Stockholm" as a metaphor for just about everything: sex, same-gender couples, idiots, etc. Jack gets completely lost in her interview because of it.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final chapters give some glimpses into the characters' futures, some more far-off than others. Anna-Lena and Roger seem to mend their marriage. Ro and Julia go on to have a happy family and marriage. They and the bank robber's family stay close to Estelle until she passes. Zara finally lets go of her guilt and enters a relationship with Lennart. Jim and Jack's stories are left more open-ended: the reader doesn't find out their relationship with Jack's sister ever mended, or how Jack and Nadia's conversation goes.
• You All Share My Story: The unnamed man in the prologue jumped from the bridge after he lost everything in a financial crash—a bank owner telling him that it was his own fault for giving the bank the money in the first place. Jack tried and failed to talk him out of it—but a week later, a girl almost jumped from the same bridge, and Jack hauled her to safety. The girl, Nadia, later becomes a psychologist, wanting to help people like herself. Her first patient is the very same bank owner who blamed the suicidal man: Zara. She saw Jack save Nadia from jumping, and feeling accountable for the unnamed man's suicide—thanks in no small part to a letter he sent her beforehand, which she hasn't opened even years after—has followed Nadia's life in a form of repentance. Zara goes to apartment viewings frequently just so she can see the bridge that the man jumped from. It is during one viewing that a hostage situation occurs, and Jack, know a police officer, is spearheading the case.