Reading "Us Against You" by Fredrik Backman during the Kavanaugh hearings

Reading lots of memoirs by incredible people like Stacey Abrams, Cecile Richards and Shawn Askinosie has worn me out a bit. They have grit and created successful movements and organizations and wrote books to help others. Their works are inspiring, and I may never achieve anything similar.

So, I picked up my first fiction novel by the popular Fredrik Backman. He's well-loved for his book, A Man Called Over, which was also made into a well-loved film. His works have a reputation for being elegant, focusing on the spectrum of humanity, and still remain perhaps a bit heartwarming.

"Us Against You" was published in 2018, and gives me a chance to vote for it in the upcoming Goodreads books of the year standings. I really want to be able to vote and choose between nominees this year, so I started reading the book on Scribd without knowing what it was about and ignoring that it's a sequel to a book that I haven't read.

Since I didn't know before starting, the story of a community and its people coping in the aftermath of a rape surprised me in how close it was to the feelings that many have watching the unfolding Kavanaugh hearings and now impending, one-week extension to his FBI background check. The first book, "Beartown" described the hockey team and sports-identities of the community and ends with the rape of the manager's daughter, Maya, by the star player. "Us Against You" deals with what happens next, after witness corroborate the claims and the rapist and his family leave the town.

The 27% that I've read explores how a community is divided to take sides, hurting everyone, and how victims and their families and supporters often take the brunt of the hurt. Maya's family is being torn about because the town has decided to close the hockey club most associated with the scandal. This changes the lives of everyone associated with the club, coaches, players, parents, fans, and politicians. by

It reminds me of this exchange from an interview with forgiveness scholar L. Gregory Jones by Tara Isabella Burton.

Tara Isabella Burton: So, something I’m very curious about is the twofold nature of repentance in, let’s say, the #MeToo movement, or any kind of public exposure of wrongdoing. There’s the process of forgiveness or reconciliation between the victim and the accuser. And there’s a separate issue — the public apology — a demand to make restitution, in some sense, to the community. How do those two processes work together, and how do they differ? What does an accused sexual harasser owe to his victim, versus to society at large?

L. Gregory Jones: The most important step should be in terms of an apology or repentance to the person or people who’ve been harmed. That’s the most important step in the process. The broader recognition of society is really a way of saying, “I accept that my responsibility has had consequences beyond the victim himself or herself or themselves.” It’s to say that “I acknowledge that what I have done harms folks indirectly as well as people directly.” What you really want is a full-throated apology that both says, “I harmed this person, or these people directly,” and, “I’ve also compromised standards that really matter to society, and so hurt a lot of people indirectly.”

What's interesting to me in reading this book is the question of what "compromised standards... really matter to society"? We can see some of the consequences. The author explicitly states that these consequences are ultimately rooted in denial:

"people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe" p.21/506 of e-book

and after evidence and witnesses made it clear that Maya told the truth:

"His name has been erased from Hed's [the team that took him while in denial] membership register, but it's still on Beartown's. That way everyone was able to move far enough away from both perpetrator and victim, so now all Kevin's former friends can call him a 'psychopath' while still calling Maya a 'bitch'. Lies are simple; truth is difficult."p.23/506 of e-book 

So, I extend what Tara Burton asks about an forgiving an individual to ask the same of forgiving ourselves as individuals and a community: "...what forms should rehabilitation and forgiveness take? How can we, as a society, establish processes and procedures by which offenders can make restitution for their actions?"

What isn't said in her article, is that the community holds responsibility as well. That we have to forgive each other and rehabilitate ourselves, even if we aren't the direct perpetrator or the victim. In the way we responded and continue to respond after making mistakes, we need to reflect and correct and resolve. This book seems to me to explore that at least a bit to make this whole Kavanaugh process a little easier to deal with.