A Disappointing Sequel

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

I wanted to like Us Against You so much more than I did.  The sequel to Backman’s wonderful Beartown, this picks up soon after the first book ends, with the town in mourning over the loss of their hockey team and the cloud hanging over the events that led to its demise. Most of the characters, both major and minor, return and several new ones are introduced, including a slimy politician named Richard Theo who plays people off of each other in order to elevate himself, and a female coach who takes over the newly formed A-team.  Theo entices a foreign company to re-open the Beartown factory and sponsor the reconstituted team and the story is off, but as with the first book, it is less a story about hockey and more a story about identity, judgment and ethics.  Members of the Andersson family struggle in the aftermath of the previous events. Peter has (temporarily) lost his job as manager of the hockey program and isn’t sure who he is without hockey in his life.  Kira, who has always put her career on the back burner to support Peter’s dreams, finds her resentment growing when new job opportunities present themselves and she struggles with her roles as wife, mother and lawyer.  Leo, small for his age and not nearly good enough at hockey to make the team, isn’t sure who he wants to be and finds himself siding with the Pack, a group of tough townies.  Maya is perhaps the most sure of herself having taken a stand in the previous book. 

Unfortunately, there are some fairly ugly moments here without many joyful ones to counterbalance. There’s just a lot of meanness – between the rival Hed players and Beartown, and between those who live in the Heights and those who live in the Hollow. Anti-gay sentiment rears its nasty head, threatening the future of the team and its best player and destroying at least one career.  The fact that the book is darker was a downer and Backman’s style of inserting the voice of an unnamed, philosophizing townsperson – not unlike a Greek chorus – gets old.  What might have seemed like charming aphorisms in the earlier book come across here as tired clichés and annoying interruptions.  Examples:  “Politics is never strictly linear, big changes don’t come out of nowhere , there’s always a series of smaller causes” (144). “We don’t know people until we know their greatest fears” (243).  “Finding out the truth about people is like fire, destructive and indiscriminate” (275). “Hockey is the simplest sport in the world, if you’re sitting in the stands.  It’s always so easy to say what everyone should have done when you now that what they actually did didn’t work”( 283).  It’s as if the author feels he needs to tell the readers the idea rather than letting us draw conclusions from the actions of the characters.

I would not discourage readers of Beartown from picking up Us Against You, but I do warn you:  be prepared for a less satisfying read.