Can someone please just give Karl Ove a back massage?

The latest instalment from Scandinavian superstar Karl Ove Knausgård’s intensely autobiographical My Struggle series cements his reputation as a writer in desperate need of release

At last, an answer to the question that plagued me in adolescence

Dancing in the Dark

By Karl Ove Knausgård Random House

560 pp; $26

What do men want? I’ve spent an embarrassing percentage of my life trying to figure that out, in accordance with the curse of heterosexual norms; desiring people even as you grow up believing them to be diametrically opposed to everything you are.

Recently, I emailed a friend a list of boys I had spent too much time thinking about as a teenager, a mostly funny but sort of sad list of the crushes who had consumed my childish fantasies. After I pressed send I instantly remembered the few I had forgotten: an eighth-grade classmate who was the first to round a particularly sexual base, an illicit romance with an older boy who came to my house carrying a Dashboard Confessional CD. How could I have forgotten them, I wondered.

I read the latest instalment of Karl Ove Knausgård’s auto-fictive project, Dancing in the Dark, with a similar, if diametrically opposed, question: how could he have remembered them all? Every girl, every woman, preserved as fact, if not quite as a complete human — their defining characteristic the rush of blood they flow to his penis, a worthy if imprecise metric of value for another person.

But it’s not just his heterosexuality he remembers and recounts. Dancing in the Dark is the fourth book in the series collectively — and hilariously — titled My Struggle, each book a painstakingly precise inventory of his own life from childhood to present. Six volumes have already been published in his native Norway, and the English translation of the fourth volume details the year he spent as an 18-year-old teacher in a small Norwegian town, living on his own, trying to embody the kinds of writers he admires: Hemingway, Kerouac, Salinger, an adolescent character detail I would dismiss as “too easy” if this were anyone else’s novel. He shares his ambitions (powerful, adorable), his values (rigid, unquestioning), each and every one of his boners (constant, tormenting).

The book leaves no question as to what he is thinking, doing, feeling; each page is dedicated to the all the minutiae of growing up that can so easily slip away. Here, at last, was the unfiltered answer to the question that had plagued my adolescent self. Here, at last, was the truth I had suspected: what do teenage boys want? Not much.

That’s an overly simplistic answer, but this is an overly simplistic book. Knausgård values telling, not showing, an inverse of what we normally consider effective or beautiful writing. He tells us he admires Hemingway and wants to be a writer like him, and perhaps his short, clipped sentences evoke Hemingway in structure, but the effect of all those short, clipped sentences over 560 pages do not show us that Hemingway’s belief in brevity have had any lasting hold. Minimalist writing works best when it conceals maximum emotions. Knasguaard’s emotions, at this period of his life, are shallow; deeply felt, I’m sure, but superficial regardless.

I mean, he’s 18 years old! He feels everything and nothing all at once, all hormonal extremes and still-forming frontal lobes, but this autobiographical novel has more in common with a to-do list than a journal. There’s all the detail of a diary, but none of the emotions or vulnerability that makes reading someone’s private thoughts worth the thrill. The ultimate feeling we’re left with is, instead, that of being chilled; even his expressions of emotions (“I sobbed” “I wanted her”) are held at a remove. Page after page flip by with a soothing predictability: his reveals are reminders that people remain the same, that teens will always be teens, united by their dreams and their needs, gross as they are.

Of course, that’s not to say there are no surprises in the book. The one admission that gave me pause was that, at 18, Knausgård had never masturbated, a surprising character detail for a teenage boy, yet one I instinctively trusted. All those words travelling with no defined destination: here is a writer in desperate need of blowing his load.

I found myself regressing to that same teenage girl as I read the book, drawn in despite presumably knowing better: perhaps, I thought, this superficiality hides great depths, and I kept flipping the pages, wondering if this teenage boy was just waiting for the right girl to reveal those depths. Of course, that never quite happens. Instead each short sentence and long digression acts as a question Knausgård is asking himself first, the question we know and will instinctively reflect back on our own lives. What do we want? Not much.