“My Struggle: Book Four," by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The setting is Norway in the late ’80s. At 19 years of age, Karl Ove’s life is dictated by two fluids: semen and alcohol. He is obsessed with getting the first into the body of a beautiful woman, and he chugs down dangerous quantities of the second as oft
Do I need to add that this is the late-adolescent volume of “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-book autobiographical mega-novel that has taken the American literary world by storm? Getting his first real experiences of freedom and manhood, Karl Ove heads to Norway’s fabled far north, where he will spend the year after high school teaching homeroom to boys and girls scarcely younger than he. Thrust into a beautiful, wild and alien landscape, he seizes an irresistible chance to start over — yet still carries within him the potent childhood relationships that Knausgaard hints will forever rule his life.
The most important of these is the irremediably broken one with his father. Karl Ove well knows that in heading north to teach, he is following that man, who recently decamped from Norway’s more temperate south with the woman who replaced Karl Ove’s mother to pursue the same career. Father and son are also alike in the pernicious levels their alcohol abuse reaches in these years. Knausgaard plays this all with a cat’s grinning silence, endlessly demonstrating the parallels but resisting the urge to connect them.
For all of the oedipal weight he carries in Book Four, Karl Ove is still very much the goofy kid, and Knausgaard has the good sense to treat his escapades with a voluble irony edging uncomfortably toward masochism. Driven to a carnal frenzy, Karl Ove’s bloodhoundlike advances produce many sharp rejections; even when a woman does allow him to share her bed, everything always goes wrong, usually for a humiliating reason.
But lust is merely the centerpiece of the stupid behavior in Book Four: a short list would include theft, alcoholic blackouts, projectile vomiting, writerly pretensions, sneaking into strip clubs, trashing a hotel room, treating his grandparents like an ATM, and a truly egregious episode of drunken resentment that spoils his father’s second wedding.
Written between the lines of this decadent teenage mayhem are the lessons Karl Ove is learning on his way to manhood. For all his youthful narcissism, he also conducts himself with enough discipline to land a plum job as a newspaper music critic and to churn out a book’s worth of apprentice stories. And although he has a one-track-mind regarding desirable young women, when it comes to other relationships — workplace, familial, friendships — we can see Karl Ove learning from his frequent errors and genuinely trying to be good.
It must be said that Knausgaard knows how to tell an anecdote — he has got a million of them — and in Book Four he manages to casually blend anecdote after anecdote into the book’s two main plot arcs: his twin quests to write and get laid. This volume’s biggest contribution to American letters may very well be its good humor, dearly missing in what has become a morosely serious literary landscape. One is always on the lookout for some new absurdity, the next in a string of dauntless meat-headery that could only happen to Karl Ove.
But what we gain in horsepower and feral glee we lose in the shivering existential seeking that made Books One and Two so striking. From the immensely complex father-son relationship to the developing minds entrusted to Knausgaard’s care and the first stirrings of literary ambition, nothing seems to provoke more than a few chance thoughts one might scribble on an envelope while waiting for the bus.
This is all to the point that Book Four is a charming act of improvisation in the face of impending doom. Much like what unceasingly happens to his protagonist, Knausgaard has gotten himself in over his head: He is churning out pages by the day, manacled by his own vain super-ambition to a project that nobody in their right mind would attempt. He has written a thousand pages already, and he still has more than a thousand to go. Deadlines are looming everywhere, and the backlash to his success is already under way.
As a doomed effort to write himself out of a trench of his own creation, Book Four achieves a kind of success in spite of itself. Nobody but a hack critic on deadline would mistake it for literary genius, but as a scramble from the moody engine-revving of Books One and Two to the Götterdämmerung of Book Six, it feels right, filling us in on the necessary details and doing a pretty compelling pastiche of adolescent angst along the way. You can’t help but be impressed at Knausgaard’s capacity to hit the ground running and not let up. Sure, there’s plenty to quibble with here, but I’ve never witnessed a man sprint the middle distance of a marathon with such blind terror.
For all of the oedipal weight he carries in Book
Four, Karl Ove is still very much the goofy kid,
and Knausgaard has the good sense to treat his
escapades with a voluble irony edging
uncomfortably toward masochism.