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 11-15 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “One Last Chance to Be a Winner”
Peter and Kira Andersson continue to face problems in communicating about their real concerns with one another. On the little island where she is camping with Ana, Maya thinks about her parents and their marriage. She realizes that the vocabulary of the family has started to shift, and she worries about them too. Meanwhile, Benji’s sister Adri meets with “the Pack” in the forest. The Pack is known as a local gang who take on responsibility for the ice hockey club. Spider and Teemu are feared throughout the community, but also respected. It’s unclear what they’re giving Adri in the forest or why, but they discuss Peter Andersson and Teemu says that if he didn’t think Peter could turn this misfortune around, Peter wouldn’t be around. Peter pauses at the door of his home (where Kira is waiting inside to test that pause) when he sees Richard Theo walking towards him. Theo tells him he has a chance of becoming a winner again.
Chapter 12 Summary: “I Am Prepared to Burn in Here”
Like his sister Maya, Leo Andersson has noticed the shift in his parent’s relationship. One morning he wakes up and everyone is out of the house, so he goes to Maya’s room to read her poetry. Leo is 12 years old and lost about what to do and how to manage his grief and anger, so he continues to scratch into his skin until he scars.
William Lyt is committed to changing everything for himself now that Kevin is gone and Beartown hockey is finished. He wants to show everybody that he is in charge. He notices that whoever lit up the Hed flags on the beach has scars on their arms. At the beach, William investigates all the junior kids’ arms for signs that they could be the one. Leo gives William a lighter for his cigarette, purposefully showing his scars. William attacks, and Leo fights back. William is six years older and much bigger, but he ends the beat up when members of the Pack show up.
Richard Theo tells Peter that he knows who is buying the old factory in Beartown, and that the owner can sponsor Beartown Ice Hockey Club. Peter wants hockey to be separate from politics, but Theo points out that the Pack has always made sure Peter stayed in power. They need a new coach, because their former coach is ill, but the glimpse of hope keeps Peter engaged in this strange conversation with Richard.
Chapter 13 Summary: “So They Gave Him an Army”
Amat is forlorn without hockey. His mother is busy helping a sick friend, his hockey team no longer practices, and he is ostracized from the other teenagers for standing up against Kevin in the rape case. His former friends have moved on to different lives: Zacharias spends all his time playing video games while Lifa becomes a tough guy and joins his brother’s gang. With nothing else to do, Amat goes to the Hill where teenagers gather to party. Someone hands him a cigarette then a beer, but his momentary escape is interrupted by Lifa throwing him away from the Hill. Lifa forces Amat to Zacharias’s apartment and together they tell him that the town expects great things from Amat, and needs it. Amat can’t afford to mourn the club or party his troubles away—he needs to train. The two former friends help Amat run, and soon all of the Hollow (a poor area of Beartown) cheers him on.
Chapter 14 Summary: “A Stranger”
Peter goes to visit Sune, the former Beartown hockey coach, a man who nurtured Peter when he was an abused child. Sune surprises Peter with his age and decrepitude—Peter can see how ill Sune is. Peter tells him about Theo’s plan to have a company buy the factory and sponsor the team, on the condition that Peter publicly renounce the Pack. Sune invites him in, and there is Elisabeth Zackell, Theo’s pick for the next coach of the Beartown Ice Hockey Club. Zackell is a world champion hockey player, but as a woman it is difficult to find a well-respected job in the hockey world. They discuss her potential job as Beartown coach despite all the odds stacked against the team. Later, Peter meets Alicia, a little girl who finds sanctuary at the back of Sune’s house playing hockey on her own.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Vidar Rinnius”
Peter and Zackell immediately clash about Zackell’s goals for the team. Zackell is excellent with hockey, not so good with people and their subliminal emotions. Sune believes this will make Peter and Zackell productive opposites when they work together, but Zackell notes that Peter seems so angry. Zackell tells him that she’ll have to rework the team completely, and that she plans on having Amat, Bobo, and Benji lead the team. Zackell shows Peter another name that triggers his anger: Vidar Rinnius, Teemu’s younger brother. Vidar has been away from high school and hockey in a clinic for teenagers who need extra discipline. He acts impulsively and with violence, and Peter and Zackell argue over whether this should exclude him from the hockey team. Zackell argues that Vidar is the best hockey goalie the town has seen in years, and that’s all she needs to make a good hockey team.
Teemu shares the news of his brother’s release from the clinic with Ramona. The news comes as a happy surprise, because Vidar was supposed to be away for much longer. Even the teachers and administrators at the local school are surprised (and frightened) that he is returning to them so early. Peter realizes that it must have been Richard Theo who found a way to get Vidar released early.
Chapters 11-15 Analysis
Although there are gangs and petty local politics, the people of Beartown are nuanced in their understanding of one another. For example, Ramona sees the good in Teemu that others refuse to look for. Every character introduced so far is multidimensional. The teenagers find this confusing and try to hide their own nuances while refusing to acknowledge the many layers of emotion and identity in others. This is evidenced in the fight between William and Leo: Both are running from something in themselves, and both decide to hide that part of themselves and take it out on one another instead.
If this seems like a cliché of adolescent experience, it’s because Backman is deliberately using clichés to turn reader’s expectations inside out. For example, Backman strategically calls Zackell “the stranger” or just “Zackell”; when Backman reveals that Zackell is a woman, Backman offers a surprise to those readers with preconceived notions of what a hockey player or coach looks and acts like, as well as how those notions are paralleled and reflected in Backman’s novel. Backman shows the reader that while it is easy to judge the small-town mindset of Beartown, a closed-minded attitude towards strangers and Others is more universal than Beartown.
It is symbolically suitable to the development of theme and plot that Zackell, who may be the one to help save Beartown, is a woman. The toxic masculinity characteristic of athletics and rural life (another cliché, but again, an important one) needs to be balanced and challenged by someone like Zackell. Peter notices this dichotomy, acknowledging that it’ll be good PR for the town to have a woman hockey coach after the club essentially shut down because of a boy committing rape. However, virtually all of the men, with the exception of Richard Theo, have been characterized as self-conscious of their masculinity and unsure of their peers’ perceptions of that masculinity. It is the anxiety of being a “man” that drives Leo inward and towards self-abuse, that propels William into agitating violence, and that makes Peter shy away from his concerned wife.
Backman foreshadows the return of Vidar Rinnius, a much-feared teenager in the community for his poor impulse control and his predilection for violence. Thought the reader has yet to properly meet Vidar, it seems only fitting that the team would need someone like Vidar to return. Beartown is about to receive a second chance to win and fix their broken identity, so Vidar’s second chance seems like a fitting parallel to make between plot and character. In Chapter 14, the narrator describes the simplicity of hockey and names the title, “Us against you” (123). Now, the connection between title and plot is clear to the reader. There is no “me” against “you”—either the whole team comes together as an “us,” or Beartown cannot succeed. That challenge begins with Zackell taking over, Vidar returning, and Peter giving up his last form of protection in the Pack.
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By Fredrik Backman
