Hockey rules in Backman’s complicated ‘Beartown’
‘A Man Called Ove’ hit author returns
First Stieg Larsson ( The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and now Fredrik Backman: Novelists are quickly becoming Sweden’s greatest export.
Backman’s debut novel, A Man Called
Ove, has sold nearly 1.5 million copies in the USA, and its film adaptation was nominated for best foreign picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Backman has been churning out novels in short order ever since
Ove, and Beartown (Atria, 415 pp., out of four) eeeE is his latest slice of Swedish life to hit American shores. Consider this the Friday
Night Lights of the ice rink. In the rural forest community of Beartown, the economy has stagnated and the residents increasingly rely on hockey as their main source of pride, putting a lot of pressure on the local junior team’s national championship prospects.
The teen players are treated like little kings, as if the young sports stars needed any goading.
At first the primary target for the group’s aggression would seem to be Amat, the son of an immigrant single mother, who shows an extraordinary natural aptitude for the game. But at a drunken victory party, it’s the general manager’s teenage daughter, Maya, who is assaulted by a star player, and the town must grapple with its hockey-over-all-else mentality.
Backman carefully sets up the events leading to the sexual assault so it is a constellation of the racism and classism and sexism of the community, an effective dramatization of the novel’s themes. Though its story is undeniably powerful, little about Beartown is subtle: Backman prefers the hammer over the scalpel.
In case you miss the theme that the hockey players are seen as products more than people, he’ll tell it to you again and again. When Maya finally tells her parents about the assault that will tear Beartown apart, her father’s coffee cup drops and shatters, and on “one of the biggest pieces you can still see parts of the pattern from the front of the cup. A bear.” Get it? THE TOWN IS BREAKING APART!
If the opposite of this muscle flexing would be a book with too little emotional content, we should be glad Backman has chosen this side of the bargain. When he turns his talents to unusual subjects, such as a teammate who is secretly gay or the repercussions of trauma, then Beartown rises above its melodramatic tendencies and shines, turning its narrative swagger into an asset.
Backman is a canny manipulator of sentiments, and Beartown has all the pleasures of a rainyday matinee. Throughout the drama, hockey itself comes across as something “incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all. But what the hell else is life made of ?”