Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

First published in Sweden in 2019; published in translation by Atria Books on September 8, 2020

Anxious People is a novel about a bank robbery that triggers a hostage drama. But no, it’s really a novel about a desperate man who jumps from a bridge and a desperate girl who doesn’t. But no, it’s not really about any of that. Fredrik Backman tells us that Anxious People is about idiots because that’s what we all are: idiots who are doing the best we can. Anxious People is a sweet, unpredictable, laugh-out-loud story of diverse individuals who begin to overcome their anxieties by recognizing the need to let go of the past while embracing a more compassionate future.

Abandoned by a spouse who had an affair and desperate for money to avoid eviction and an ensuing loss of child custody, a parent makes the unfortunate decision to rob a bank. The robbery is futile because the robber unwittingly chooses a cashless bank. The fleeing robber dashes through the nearest door and up a light of stairs where a realtor is showing an apartment. By wielding a gun that the robber assumes to be a toy, a hostage situation begins. Or maybe not, because the robber doesn’t want to frighten anyone and taking hostages was never part of the plan.

The story is driven by the quirky personalities of each person attending the apartment showing. From time to time we also encounter Jim and Jack, police officers who are father and son. Backman mixes in transcripts of Jack’s interviews with the hostages after they are released. None of the hostages are particularly good at being interviewed, but they are quite good at infuriating Jack. The interviews digress into silliness that makes a strong contribution to the story’s merriment.

As the title suggests, the characters are anxious. A couple of them are anxious to buy the apartment, but all are anxious in the sense of experiencing anxiety. They seem to be concerned about how others perceive them, taking political correctness to extremes for fear of being seen as prejudiced when they discuss gay people — except for Julia and Ro, lesbians who are expecting a child. They argue constantly, perhaps because they enjoy making up.

Competing against Julia and Ro for the apartment are Roger and Ana-Lena, an older couple who may be together as a function of habit rather than connection. Roger is obsessively competitive (he makes money by flipping apartments) while Ana-Lena feels the need to explain what Roger means every time Roger speaks.

Lennart appears in the story after he is forced out of the apartment’s bathroom because Julia needs to use it. Lennart has no pants but is wearing a rabbit head. Despite his unconventional attire, Lennart is probably the story’s most idealistic character. Apartments typically come up for sale because of death or divorce, but Lennart believes there’s something romantic about all the apartments that aren’t for sale. It is possible to imagine that they are occupied by happy couples.

Zara and Estelle have each attended the showing for reasons unrelated to a desire to purchase the property. Estelle is an older woman learning to live without her husband, a man who was everything to her despite having little in common with her. Zara, a prosperous banker who annoys her therapist, is acerbic and judgmental, making it no surprise that she’s lonely. Zara is surprised to discover a connection between her therapist and one of the other characters.

Jim and Jack love each other, as father and son should, but don’t know how to express it, as fathers and sons almost never do. Jack is among the characters who have been touched by the man who jumped from the bridge ten years earlier. Jack became a cop with the noble purpose of saving people, but it is up to his father to teach Jack that making an arrest isn’t always the best way to save someone.

The hostage drama triggers empathy in each of the characters, all of whom have at some point been frightened and lost, all of whom felt anxiety before the robber appeared. We live in a world we share with strangers who harbor the same anxieties. We brush against each other and, as Backman illustrates, we have an impact on each other in ways we may never understand.

Each character in Anxious People makes a bit of progress toward anxiety relief, because one bit at a time is all that anyone can manage. We start by admitting that there’s “an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest,” and by recognizing that other people feel the same way. We try to internalize the belief that things we blame ourselves for are not always our fault. We make an effort to understand other people and to care about them, even if they are not like us, because caring about others is essential to caring about ourselves.

Letting go of negativity and all the unimportant things that anchor us might create anxiety in the form of uncertainty, but not knowing what happens next is a good starting point from which to build a better life. If we are nothing more than the sum of our experiences, Backman says, we could not live with ourselves. “We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.” Sometimes we need someone to give us a second chance. Sometimes we need to give ourselves one.

Backman keeps the reader guessing about the bank robber’s fate. Will the robber escape and, if so, how? Backman dangles possibilities to make the reader think “I know how the robber escapes” before foreclosing them. So there’s an element of mystery, but the plot exists largely to frame the characters and to showcase their anxieties and the lessons they learn. And to make the reader laugh, a goal Backman accomplishes on every page.

I suppose there’s a degree of sappiness in the self-help advice that Backman offers, but the story is told with so much heart and humor that even the most cynical reader should be able to embrace it. Whether or not a reader appreciates Backman’s lessons, it would be difficult to dislike the characters or to avoid laughing at them in recognition that they are, like us, idiots who are doing the best they can.

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The Forger's Daughter by Bradford Morrow

Published by Grove Atlanti/Mysterious Press on September 8, 2020

The Forger’s Daughter is a sequel to Bradford Morrow's The Forgers. Like the novel it follows, The Forger’s Daughter is a literary suspense novel. Since the relevant plot details of The Forgers are scattered through the sequel, it isn’t necessary to read the first novel to appreciate the second. While there is always some benefit to reading the first novel before reading the sequel, The Forger’s Daughter can be read as a standalone.

Will is no longer a forger. Instead, he works for an auction house, offering opinions about the authenticity of signatures. His wife owns a bookshop that specializes in rare books. His daughter Nicole has learned his skills as a forger, although she devotes her talent to assisting Will with the letterpress shop he operates. Will and Meghan have adopted a child named Maise whose true heritage is known to Meghan but not to Will.

In the first novel, a villain named Slader robbed Will of three fingers. Slader returns to blackmail Will with pictures that purport to show a crime that Will committed in the first novel. Slader has stolen a rare edition of Poe’s Tamberlane. He wants Will to replicate it so that the original can be replaced with a forged copy. The plan calls for Will to then alter the original a bit, to add Poe’s signature. and to forge an accompanying letter asking a reviewer to read it. Will agrees not just to avoid exposure but because of an implied threat that Maisie will be harmed if he refuses.

Will and Meghan narrate The Forger’s Daughter in alternating chapters. They tell their stories in the same voice, a fact that isn’t troublesome, given that both are well educated devotees of literature and are thus likely to share an elegant narrative style.

The two novels are something of an homage to Poe, particularly drawing uppon “The Purloined Letter,” a story in which the story’s hero, Auguste Dupin, creates a forgery. Apart from educating the reader with Poe lore, the novel offers some tips in the art of literary fakery, adding both interest and authenticity to the narrative.

The element of suspense in The Forger’s Daughter is low key. In fact, the novel as a whole might be characterized as low energy. It never creates the strong sense that anything bad will happen to anyone, apart from a cat that goes missing for a while. The characters, good and bad, are all very civilized, perhaps too well bred to behave violently, notwithstanding Slader’s amputation of Will’s fingers in the earlier book. Even when a moment of violence does arrive, the act is low key, the sort of thing that might be followed by a cup of tea (actually, it’s followed by a fine wine).

The novel’s value is found in its characterizations and prose more than its plot, and perhaps for its insights, some purloined from Poe. The ending of the sequel creates a pleasant symmetry between the two novels. The Forger’s Daughter tells an interesting story rather than a memorable one, but Morrow tells it very well.

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The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 8, 2020

Chuck Palahniuk is known for transgressive fiction, but being transgressive for the sake of being transgressive gets old. Shock value only has value if it wakes readers up or makes them think. The Invention of Sound isn’t particularly shocking — I don’t know if it is still possible to shock readers with violence — but more to the point, the novel has nothing new to say. It’s simply Palahniuk being Palahniuk.

The story centers on the production of sound effects — particularly screams — for movies. Palahniuk gives the reader interesting tidbits about screams, yodels, and other vocalizations that moviegoers have heard, probably without realizing that they’ve heard the identical scream in other movies. The Wilheim scream, for example, is a stock sound effect that has been used in over four hundred movies. Who knew?

Mitzi Ives has followed in her father’s footsteps as a Foley artist by making a lucrative living recording screams. They seem more realistic than the screams produced by actors because they are actual screams produced by fear, torture, and fear of torture. After tying down her victims in a sound studio, Ives sedates herself with Ambien and alcohol so she won’t remember what she did. The reader will find that odd and will likely not be surprised to learn the truth about the torture sessions.

The surrounding plot involves a long-missing girl named Lucinda (her face has been on every milk carton in the country, presumably terrorizing children who wonder when they too will go missing) and her father, Gates Foster, who spends his time tracking down pedophiles in the apparent belief that one of them must be to blame for his daughter’s absence. An aging actress named Blush Gentry adds her perspective, both as a character and as the author of an autobiography, excepts of which pepper the plot. A caricature of a producer and a supernatural element are additional ingredients in a stew of clashing flavors.

Foster can’t come to terms with his loss, as he makes clear when he disrupts Lucinda’s funeral. He even pays actresses to play her part based on computer-generated likenesses of what she would look like at the age of 24. So okay, that might be a shocking, although I’d probably categorize it as creepy.

The novel’s key concept seems to be that the blending together of screams can create a sound that is greater than the sum of its parts, a sound that can wreak havoc. That’s likely intended to be disturbing but Palahnuik didn’t make me feel anything for the theater patrons who find themselves buried in rubble after the collective scream is unleashed. If the novel is intended as a work of horror, it is less than horrifying. Perhaps it is intended instead as dark humor, but if so, it doesn’t generate enough grins to be satisfying.

Palahnuik can always be counted on to craft interesting if twisted characters. His in-your-face prose style always creates a sense of immediacy that always keeps me reading to the end. Perhaps true fans of transgressive fiction will love The Invention of Sound. Readers who wonder, as I did, if Palahnuik had a point other than showing off how transgressive he can be will probably agree that this is not his best book.

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The Hooligans by P.T. Deutermann

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 28, 2020

War novels are not a staple of my reading list. Unless, that is, they are written by P.T. Deutermann. While Deutermann is a skilled author of thrillers, he uses his suspense-building skills and his experience as a naval officer to good effect when he writes about World War II naval conflicts.

War novels often follow the path of earlier war novels, telling familiar stories of valor and bravery and self-sacrifice. All of that is present in The Hooligans, but Deutermann gives the story a fresh spin by making the main character a doctor. Lincoln Andersen had finished the third year of a seven-year surgical residence at Duke Medical School when he decided to enlist. His flat feet kept him out of the Army but, after Pearl Harbor, the Navy needed warm bodies.

The Navy teaches Andersen to salute and sends him to a base on the Solomon Islands, where he’s assigned to a field hospital to help with casualties the Navy suffered at Guadalcanal. Thanks to Andersen’s failure to complete his surgical residency, the “real” surgeons view him as a wannabe surgeon. Anderson is promptly reassigned as the squadron doctor for a group of P.T. boats. The squadron is known as the Hooligan Navy because the “real” Navy doesn’t have much use for P.T. boats. His commanding officer doubtless saw the assignment as a way to keep Andersen away from “real” field hospitals, but Andersen sees it as a chance to save lives.

Over the course of the novel, as soldiers and sailors battle the Japanese, Andersen teaches himself to be a trauma surgeon. He draws on his three years of residency and, when he doesn’t know what to do, has someone read him a field manual that explains the procedure as he’s performing it. He doesn’t save every life but he saves enough that he comes to be known, with a good bit of affection, as Superman.

Andersen tags along with the Hooligans for a couple of years as they make their way closer to Japan, eventually serving his last duty in the Philippines. He survives bombings and torpedo attacks while working himself beyond exhaustion as he strives to patch the wounded so they can be transported to a field hospital for more complete care. He also survives a military bureaucracy that threatens his career when “real” surgeons learn that he has been performing life-saving procedures for which, by their standards, he is unqualified. The sailors whose lives he stayed no doubt disagree.

Battle scenes are harrowing and all the more realistic because Andersen isn’t a combatant who strides bravely into battle. He’s a guy who steps up his game when he’s in over his head because nobody else is in a position to perform battlefield surgery. He overcomes a bit of self-doubt and an enormous amount of professional envy while doing his best to stay alive and help others. Andersen is a likable character because, while not needlessly humble, he isn’t full of himself.

Deutermann creates a detailed view of the various island locations in which Andersen finds himself. He explains the hardships faced by the forgotten Hooligans who have to raid other naval vessels to get the supplies they need. He introduces interesting and offbeat secondary characters, not all of them in the military. Some are fated to die, not always in battle. Beyond his ability to create atmosphere and convincing characters, Deutermann brings home the horrors of war and its impact on the soldiers, sailors, nurses, and doctors as they are wounded and watch others die, always knowing that death in war is a game of chance.

I can’t fault Deutermann for a feel-good ending because Andersen endures so much pain that he deserves a happy ending. Yet even the ending brings a reminder that nobody escapes war unscathed. While The Hooligans is a quick read because of its adrenalin-pumping nature, the novel’s attention to atmosphere and characterization raise it to a higher level than a typical war novel.

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Dark Hollows by Steve Frech

Published in Great Britain in 2019; published by HarperCollins/HQ on September 1, 2020

Dark Hollows straddles the border between thriller and horror. Much of the story occurs around the Halloween season. Elements of horror spring out of the text on occasion, including spooky woods and a graveyard, the appearance of a woman who might be a ghost, and a cockroach infestation. The novel also depends on the underlying fear that something evil might be done to a dog, which for dog lovers is pretty horrific.

Jacob Reese lives in a Vermont town called The Hollows. He owns a coffee shop that he hopes to franchise. He also rents out a cottage on his property as sort of a bed-and-breakfast without the breakfast. Everyone seems to like Jacob well enough and they adore his dog Murphy.

Jacob has a dark secret in his past. He was once a low-level drug courier (not so much a dealer as a go-between, although there’s no legal distinction between the two roles). Jacob was dating a woman named Laura until his unlawful employment got in the way of their relationship. Laura ended up dead and Jacob blamed himself, although he didn’t actually kill her.

The Hollows gives Jacob a place to hide from his past until a woman shows up who seems to be the reincarnation of Laura. Bad things (did I mention cockroaches?) begin to happen after the woman appears. It eventually becomes clear that this version of Laura places even more blame on Jacob than Jacob places on himself for Laura’s fate.

The story follows Jacob as he tries to figure out who this woman is and why she is sabotaging his life. The plot is tense at times, particularly after Murphy disappears, but lacks a “wow factor.” The story is about as credible as most modern thrillers, meaning it’s a bit far-fetched, but it never becomes so preposterous that I lost my will to suspend my disbelief. The narrative travels through its peaks and valleys at a good pace. Steve Frech pushes all the buttons that thriller writers need to push to make a reader invest in the plot, but the story is sufficiently contrived that I never lost awareness of my buttons being pushed.

Jacob is the novel’s only real character; everyone else is supporting cast. Jacob is presented as a conflicted young man, torn between past and present, striving to assuage his guilty conscience by making his current life worthwhile. The last scene requires Jacob to make a choice between accepting responsibility and the consequences of his choices or continuing on his current path. What choice he will make is deliberately ambiguous — this is a novel that allows the reader to write the ending — but Frech seems to suggest that living with a guilty conscience is a worse fate than living with the consequences of bad decisions. Personally, I think Jacob should lawyer up before he does anything, but readers can make their own judgments.

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