Anxious People

Anxious People Review

Fredrik Backman’s fourth novel opens with the line “A bank robber walks into a bank.” What follows is less a crime novel than a farcical meditation on the ways ordinary people are more interesting, more broken, and more generous than the categories they appear to occupy.

The premise is genuinely absurd: a failed bank robber — who has robbed a cashless bank — takes refuge in an apartment open house and ends up holding a group of strangers hostage. When police arrive, the robber has disappeared and the hostages, interrogated separately, give contradictory and largely unhelpful accounts. The mystery of how a person vanishes from a sealed apartment is Backman’s structural hook; the actual subject is what brought each of these people to that apartment on that particular afternoon, and what they carry with them that cannot be seen from the outside.

Backman works in ensemble — this is among his structural strengths — and the hostage group is drawn with genuine individual care. There is a couple on the verge of collapse pretending to search for a new beginning. There is a retired bank director whose decisions years ago produced consequences she could not predict. There is a woman wearing a rabbit costume who is more sane than anyone gives her credit for. The variety is comic and then, gradually, something more.

The comedy in the first half is broad by Backman’s standards — he is reaching for the farcical end of his range — but the back half earns what the front half sets up. His real subject, as always, is the interior weight that people carry in silence and the moments when strangers, improbably, see each other clearly.

The novel’s structural revelation lands with appropriate emotional force. Backman has built something more rigorous than it first appears.

An Ensemble of the Anxious

The title is the thesis: every person in that apartment is carrying a private burden of anxiety, and Backman gives each one a fully realized inner life. There is Roger and Anna-Lena, a long-married couple papering over their fears with a property-flipping hobby; Julia and Ro, an expectant couple terrified, in different ways, of the parenthood bearing down on them; Zara, a wealthy, caustic bank director hollowed out by a guilt she has never named; and Estelle, an elderly widow dreading the loneliness of an empty home. Even the woman in the rabbit costume turns out to be more grounded than anyone assumes. Backman’s gift is to let these figures begin as comic types and then quietly deepen them until each becomes a person, and the apartment fills not with hostages but with a cross-section of ordinary human fear. The comedy is the bait; the recognition is the catch.

Two Cops and a Man on a Bridge

Running beneath the farce is the novel’s emotional spine: Jim and Jack, a father-and-son pair of small-town policemen investigating the vanishing. Their relationship — tender, frustrated, grieving a shared loss — gives the book its heart, and Backman threads it to a wound a decade old: a young man who, ten years earlier, stood on a bridge while Jack tried and failed to talk him down. That memory shadows everything, and Backman gradually reveals how the bridge connects to the people in the apartment, above all to Zara, who has carried a sealed letter and an unbearable guilt ever since. The bridge becomes the book’s central image — of the gulfs between people, and of the terrifying, redemptive act of crossing them.

The Trick and the Tenderness

Backman’s structural sleight of hand — the mystery of how a hostage-taker disappears from a sealed room — is real, and its solution is satisfying. But the revelation’s true payload is moral rather than mechanical. What the frightened, ordinary people in that apartment ultimately do for a desperate stranger, and the small conspiracy of kindness they enter into, is the point the whole farce was built to deliver. Backman is interested in the quiet, anonymous mercies people extend when no one is keeping score — the choice to protect rather than condemn, to lie a little so someone else can have a chance. It is sentimental, unashamedly so, but it is earned by the structure rather than asserted, and that is the difference between Backman at his best and the cozy imitations he has inspired.

Backman’s Riskiest Register

Anxious People is the most formally playful of Backman’s novels, and its broad opening comedy pushes further toward outright farce than the bittersweet register of A Man Called Ove or the grave seriousness of Beartown. Some readers find the early zaniness and the chatty, aphoristic narrator too much; others find the alternating timelines and police-interview transcripts more demanding than the breezy premise advertises. But the gamble pays off. By the final pages the apparently scattered pieces lock together, and the novel reveals itself as a tightly engineered meditation on anxiety, loneliness, forgiveness, and the surprising grace between strangers. It is funnier and sadder than it has any right to be at once, and it confirmed Backman as something rarer than a writer of feel-good bestsellers: a genuine miniaturist of ordinary human loneliness, able to smuggle real philosophical seriousness inside a story about a hostage situation that was never really a hostage situation at all. Few popular novelists working today blend comedy and compassion with such deceptive skill.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A structurally inventive comedy about loneliness and grace: Backman uses an absurdist premise to examine the weight ordinary people carry, and the surprising kindness that can exist between strangers.

Reading Guides

• Fredrik Backman Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide