Beartown

Beartown is Fredrik Backman's 2017 novel, the first of the Beartown trilogy (followed by Us Against You in 2018 and The Winners in 2022) and the most structurally ambitious of Backman's many novels. The setting is a dying logging town deep in the Swedish forest, where the only thing the population still believes in is the junior boys' ice hockey team that has a chance to win the national semifinals and bring sponsorship money back to the town. The team's star player, Kevin Erdahl, sexually assaults Maya Andersson, the daughter of the club's general manager, the night before the semifinal. The novel is what happens to Beartown afterward.

Backman's structural method is the multi-POV omniscient narration that follows perhaps thirty characters across the town: the players, the parents, the coaching staff, the club board, the sponsors, the bar owners, the local police, the shopkeepers. The novel reads like a Russian nineteenth-century novel set in contemporary Sweden, with the same patient willingness to enter the head of every character whose opinion will matter in the resulting town-scale moral crisis. The assault and the rape-trial sequence in the back third are handled with the kind of moral seriousness that the genuine subject matter demands. The Kira Andersson chapters (Maya's mother, the immigration-lawyer wife of the club's general manager) are some of the strongest contemporary literary fiction about a specific kind of motherhood.

Recommended as required contemporary literary fiction reading, as the right Backman entry point alongside A Man Called Ove, and as one of the canonical contemporary novels about small-town moral crisis. Compare to Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, and the broader contemporary literary-realist tradition. Read Us Against You (2018) and The Winners (2022) next. The Marin Ireland audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.