Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone?
Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

If you’re looking for a short story that will make you smile, make you think and maybe even offer you a little hope, ‘The Answer Is No’ is for you.

‘The Answer Is No’ is a quirky secular parable about how to find happiness and hold on to it when others try to take it away. It’s a short story that starts by being grounded in a day-to-day life that I could relate to and becomes increasingly absurd in an almost believable way.

Lucas is a man who is has found happiness removing from his life all the things that make him unhappy, like dealing with other people. His life starts to spiral out of control because of a frying pan someone has abandoned in his building. To his amazement, this somehow becomes his problem but one that he isn’t allowed to solve. Everything he does amplifies the disruption until his entire life is destabilised. He finds himself inextricably entangled in other people’s lives just because they live in the same building as he struggles to reclaim his happiness.

I loved the humour that lubricates this story. At the start of this sixty-eight-page story, I was highlighting the funny lines. I soon realised I’d be highlighting most of the text so I gave myself up to quiet enjoyment of Backman’s humour.

Initially, the humour was quiet and dry, based on the kind of observations that make you smile because they’re so true but so seldom said. As Lucas’ life unraveled the humour became more absurd but remained funny. The tone of the story reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slapstick‘