50 pages • 1 hour read
Fredrik BackmanAnxious People
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary
The story flashes back to a session between Nadia and Zara. Zara tells Nadia that she’s picked up a new hobby of viewing “middle-class apartments” so that she can “fraternize with the most unfortunate members of society!” (92). She doesn’t tell Nadia that she’s been doing this for nearly 10 years to cope with her guilt: She feels responsible for the man on the bridge’s suicide.
Nadia asks Zara why she likes her job, and Zara says it’s because she’s an “analyst” as opposed to an “economist.” She differentiates between these two terms by saying that analysts always expect the worst and that’s why they always win. Before leaving the session, Zara asks Nadia if she believes that there are bad people in the world. Nadia says yes and then furthers her answer by saying that most people must make excuses when they make bad decisions because they can’t live with believing that they’re bad. Zara doesn’t say so aloud, but she believes that she’s a bad person. She carries around an unopened letter from the man who died by suicide, believing it to be a declaration of how bad she is.
Chapter 27 Summary
The narrator reiterates that this is a story about “idiots,” A week after the man on the bridge died, a teenage girl stood on the edge of the same bridge, inspired by his action. This girl was Nadia. She didn’t have any obvious trauma or grief in her life, she was “just sad, all the time” (98). Nadia felt like an imposter around people because she didn’t believe they could share her sadness. This extreme loneliness and despair led her onto the bridge, but Jack saw her standing there. He ran to her side and accidentally pushed her down so hard that she hit her head. When she woke up, she was in the hospital, and she never saw Jack again. As an adult, she often thinks back to the reasons that she wanted to jump off the bridge.
Zara witnessed Jack saving Nadia that day. Zara could never bring herself to approach Nadia so that she could ask her what propelled her to keep living after that moment. Instead, she follows the details of Nadia’s life from afar and continues to carry the guilt of what she believes is her part in the man on the bridge’s death.
Chapter 28 Summary
The narrator flashes back to moments before the bank robber entered the apartment. The narrator says that the “apartment viewing [is] a disaster right from the start” because every potential buyer seems to be arguing about something (104). Zara is judgmental about the low-class and seemingly dirty décor, Anna-Lena and Roger, a retired couple, are making false accusations about the apartment being drafty, and Julia and Ro, a young couple pregnant with their first child, are arguing about whether to buy the place or not. Julia is almost due and wants to buy an apartment soon, but Ro is reluctant.
Zara is the first to notice that the bank robber has entered through the front door. When Anna-Lena notices the bank robber’s ski mask and gun, she yells, “[W]e’re being robbed” (113), and everyone except Zara starts panicking.
Chapter 29 Summary
This chapter is a transcript of Jack and Anna-Lena’s conversation. She keeps lamenting her marriage troubles to Jack instead of answering his questions.
Chapter 30 Summary
The narrator says that “It’s harder than you might think to take people hostage when they’re idiots” (122), referring to the fact that none of the hostages take the bank robber seriously. Roger keeps provoking the bank robber, demanding to know whether they’re being robbed or held hostage, Zara keeps making disparaging comments about the dirty state of the apartment, and Julia questions whether the gun is even real. The bank robber asks everyone to be quiet and lie down, but no one listens to her. Estelle (an elderly woman also viewing the apartment) claps loudly in exclamation after everyone introduces themselves to the bank robber, and they all think it’s a gunshot and fall to the floor. Roger instinctively falls on top of Anna-Lena to protect her.
Chapter 31 Summary
This chapter is a transcript of Jim and Estelle’s conversation. He apologizes for everything that she’s gone through, but she says that she’s enjoyed the excitement, something she doesn’t get much of now that she’s almost 90. Jim asks her about the drawing, and she brings up how nice Julia and Ro are.
Chapter 32 Summary
Chapter 33 Summary
This chapter continues the transcript of Jim and Estelle’s conversation. Estelle says that Julia and Ro are from Stockholm. which Jim interprets as a code word for “gay” when Estelle clarifies that she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with being from there. She also says that Roger and Anna-Lena had a huge argument about the rabbit, but she doesn’t clarify what that means because another thought sidetracks her.
Chapter 34 Summary
The story flashes back to the hostages trying to figure out who’s in the bathroom. Anna-Lena begs them not to knock, but they do anyway. The person on the other side knocks back, and Anna-Lena starts crying.
Chapter 35 Summary
This chapter is a transcript of Jack questioning Roger. Roger gets defensive about his wife, while Jack asks about the floorplan of the apartment. Roger insists that the floorplan is wrong and believes that there are three feet “missing from the measurements, between the walls” (145).
Chapter 36 Summary
During the hostage scene, Julia begs the bank robber to shoot the lock off the bathroom door. Instead, a “man dressed in a rabbit costume” emerges from the bathroom willingly (147). He’s wearing a rabbit mask but no shirt or pants. The man is Lennart. Anna-Lena hired him to crash the showing so that Roger could make an offer and win the apartment. When a client hires Lennart, he goes into apartment showings and makes a fool of himself so that other people won’t want the apartment. Lennart’s been doing this at every apartment showing that Anna-Lena and Roger have attended because Anna-Lena wants Roger to feel successful.
Roger feels hurt. He realizes that he didn’t get those apartments due to his successful negotiation skills. He feels betrayed. Anna-Lena claims that she did it for his sake, to make him feel purposeful and useful in his otherwise directionless retirement. Roger punches Lennart, and Anna-Lena says that she’s sorry. She goes into the walk-in closet to give him some space.
Chapter 37 Summary
Chapter 38 Summary
Roger, the bank robber, and Ro sit in the hallway of the apartment together. They talk about relationships. Roger thinks about how devastated he feels by Anna-Lena’s betrayal and how he feels useless without her by his side.
Chapter 39 Summary
After learning that there is extra space in the apartment where the hostages were held, Jack tells Jim that he knows where the bank robber must be hiding. They rush back to the apartment to test Jack’s theory.
Chapter 40 Summary
During the hostage scene, Julia gets into the closet to comfort Anna-Lena. Julia tries to sympathize and says that Roger must be a very overbearing and dominant man, but Anna-Lena defends him. She gives anecdotes that illustrate his hidden kindness and sensitivity, and Julia is shocked to learn that Roger isn’t who she thought he was. Julia reveals that she’s scared to become a mother, but Anna-Lena encourages her.
Chapters 26-40 Analysis
In Chapter 27, the narrator claims again that this story is about “idiots,” and the subsequent chapters reveal more about the narrator’s evolving definition of this term, which is key to the theme of the Connection Between Anxiety and “Idiocy”. When the bank robber accidentally walks into an apartment showing wearing her ski mask and holding the gun, no one takes her seriously because they’re too engrossed in their own anxieties to reckon with any present danger. This is also why the narrator calls them the worst hostages ever: They don’t listen to any of the bank robber’s demands. However, this flippancy in not taking the bank robber seriously ultimately allows the characters to connect and start to overcome their anxieties through their shared experience of being hostages. The characters’ foolishness, a product of their anxiety, therefore proves key to allowing them to connect as humans. Indeed, the mistake that doubles as the novel’s inciting incident—the bank robber accidentally taking them all hostage—provides them with the literal and symbolic space to work through their anxieties: the apartment.
As the hostage drama deepens, the novel elaborates on the nature of the characters’ personal and relational anxieties. Roger and Anna-Lena are both retired and are afraid that their marriage will grow stale now that life has slowed down. Julia and Ro are afraid that they won’t be good parents and that their differences are too stark to produce a happy marriage. Zara is haunted by a guilt she can’t control or face, while Estelle is grappling with the loss of her husband.
Roger and Anna-Lena’s relationship is particularly central to this section and develops themes of both “Stockholm Syndrome,” Captivity, and Empathy and Challenging Preconceptions. As Roger blusters and Anna-Lena appears to defer to him, most of the characters interpret the dynamic between husband and wife as patriarchal at best and abusive at worst. However, the arrival of Lennart proves their perceptions wrong. Not only has Anna-Lena been the dominant force in their marriage, but Roger feels trapped in his attempts to fill a traditionally masculine role, which becomes one of the figurative forms of captivity from which the characters are trying to escape.
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By Fredrik Backman
