52 pages • 1 hour read
Fredrik BackmanUs Against You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A 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 36-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 36 Summary: “Don’t Psychopaths Go for Walks, Then?”
During the open tryouts, Vidar stuns Zackell with his reflexes. He doesn’t let any pucks into his net, and he can also hit the puck across the rink. Zackell tries out on last test: She hits a puck at his back when he’s taking his water break, then one right past his unprotected head. Vidar lunges at her and takes her down, and Teemu runs from the stands to stop him, but Zackell is elated; she realizes that if Vidar would hit a woman, there is truly nothing stopping his instincts. She knows she can use that for victory on the ice.
Vidar is the only player accepted after the try outs, a moment of sheer pride and joy for him and his brother, who don’t often get to be chosen to win. On the bus the next day, Vidar asks Ana if she’ll come to watch him play and she tells him she doesn’t like hockey players. As they walk into school, Ana spots Maya and feels the loss of her best friend. Vidar notices that Ana is upset, and they ditch school to take a walk in the woods, where they kiss, and Ana also falls in love. The political drama in the town continues, and Peter can’t find any companies who will remove the standing area at the rink, knowing that the standing area is the Pack’s territory.
Chapter 37 Summary: “What We’re Capable Of”
Kira confronts Teemu about a moving box of cartridges left on her front yard. She tells him that if he threatens her family, she’ll threaten his. Teemu’s family tries to keep their mother’s pill addiction a secret, but Kira has discovered it by going through his trash. It’s a violation of Teemu, the most dangerous man in Beartown. However, Ramona tells him that she’s disappointed in him for harassing the Anderssons. When he tells her it wasn’t him, Ramona reminds Teemu that his power comes with the responsibility to stop others when they go too far. Teemu calls Spider to spread the message that the assaults on the Andersson house need to stop; he has another way of keeping their standing area at the rink.
Benji returns to work at the Bearskin, but when he enters the place goes quiet and many of the men—including men not a part of the Pack—get up and leave. Ramona tells Benji that a lot of people had a stereotyped image of what a gay man looks and acts like, and that it takes people some time to change their misconceptions.
Chapter 38 Summary: “The Game”
Bobo has been working hard at home to support the family through his mother’s death. On the night of the A-team game against Hed, his father encourages him to go, and with a heavy heart he does. His teammates place his mother’s name on their jerseys, and now Bobo has another family. Maya and Kira both refuse to go to the game, and Peter goes without Leo who is already in the standing area. Ana is excited to go to see Vidar, but her father asks if she’d like to go for a walk. She can tell he’s trying to break his alcoholic streak, so she goes with him into the woods instead. The people who live in the Hollow are there to cheer on Amat, and the Pack cheer on Vidar. The Hed fans chant “Queers! Sluts! Rapists!” and everyone knows this game is like war.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Violence”
The game is tense and Beartown is losing without Benji and Vidar. Vidar stands with the Pack in the standing area and Benji stays on his rooftop at home. After his sister go to the game, Benji goes into the woods to find the teacher. He is packing and leaving and tells Benji that in a different situation, maybe they could have been together. Benji goes to the rink and stays at the top of the stands to watch, unseen. From up high, he watches as Hed fans pour dildos onto the Pack. He sees the hardest members of the Pack leave, and he follows them to the basement below the rink.
Teemu and his gang want to sneak into the Hed side of the stands to get back at them for the dildos, but Benji wants to prevent the inevitable violence. He locks the doors to the Hed entrance and stands in front of the Pack, demanding that they take it out on him. He tells them that if they go into the Hed side, the referees will call the game off. However, if they stop now, Benji can win the game. Teemu turns to Vidar, and Vidar goes to change for the game. Teemu is left alone with Benji, and he tells Benji if he wins the game, he’ll drink a beer with him.
Chapter 40 Summary: “Always Fair. Always Unfair.”
Before second period starts, Peter joins Zackell by the locker room and is shocked to find her smoking outside. He demands that she go in to give her team a pep talk, and as they re-enter, both Vidar and Benji ask to play. Benji is nervous when he first walks in the locker room, but he tries to focus on getting changed for the game. When he leaves the bathroom, he sees that everyone’s sneakers are filled with shaving cream—a message to Benji that in the locker room, he’s one of them.
The second half of the game is intense, with Beartown climbing back up to 4-3. The taunts from Hed decrease as more people get frustrated with the lack of sportsmanship, and a young player from Hed goes into the crowd and tells them he won’t play if they don’t stop their offensive chants. The game continues, but Beartown loses when William anticipates the pass of the puck from Benji to Amat.
Chapters 36-40 Analysis
The narrative structure of Us Against You meets its climax in these chapters. The narrator repeats the question, “What would you do for your family?”—a reminder that the characters are all at the heights of their passion because the team is like a family. Benji discovers this when his teammates rally with him and welcome him back, as does Vidar when he leaves the Pack to play in the game, trading in one family for a different one.
Backman explores the question of choice versus instinct. Backman suggests that as important as instincts are, everyone has the choice to temper those instincts. There are several moments in which characters must choose violence or its opposite, decisions that could alter their paths. The strongest example of this is when Teemu chooses not to beat through Benji to get to the Hed side of the rink and cause more violence. The Pack could easily have taken Benji down and created more chaos, but Benji and Teemu stop the violence by pausing to advocate for a more rational approach to dealing with their anger.
Similarly, Benji’s teammates could have chosen to be angry that he didn’t show up for the first half of the game, could have chosen to reject him for his sexuality. Instead, they welcome him back and choose to unify the team instead of further dividing it. Even the miscellaneous characters in the stands accept that they have a choice over the instinct to taunt at a hockey game. When Hed’s offensive chants become too much to bear, Hed fans separate themselves from the chanters. This sends a message of fraternal competition rather than warfare, which promotes the spirited nature of sport rather than succumbing to the violence of sport.
The exploration of choice over instinct is crucial at the climax of the novel. So many of the characters are identified by their proclivities towards violence, their almost animalistic need to show their brute strength. That those same characters finally choose civility over violence demonstrates character growth and plot development: Beartown is tired of the internal fighting. To compare the mindset of characters like Peter, Benji, and Teemu, among others, with their attitudes about their own selves and their community at the beginning of the novel with what happens in Chapters 36-40 is to see Backman’s point that sometimes, people need to hit rock bottom to build themselves up again. Beartown is a symbol of the people who need to build it back up. All of the violence and gossip that informed the breakdown of Beartown in the first place was a choice. While violence has been discussed in the novel as an impulse, Backman reveals that the people in Beartown are capable of so much more. This also foreshadows a future, more peaceful Beartown with happier, more unified citizens.
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