I sat on the third floor of the new library in Oslo. A sign outside the building claimed it was the greatest public library in the world. It did seem hard to beat. The library had podcast studios, 3D printers, and carpeted parking for damp strollers. I’d never seen a library so crowded. People read and worked and chatted, and children raced and yapped, and the building’s award-winning design flattened all that commotion into something you could nearly ignore. The scene had an idyllic cosmopolitan bustle of the kind you might see in a movie, moments before a nuclear strike.
I sat in the library, trying to make the best of an unwanted vacation by refusing to be on vacation. I was trying to write. My reflection in the window showed my stern, black eyebrows and my wiry, graying beard, which I hadn’t trimmed in a few weeks. Outside, it was raining on and off. I watched the white granite walkway to the Oslo opera house, where a refugee in a clear poncho was supplicated in prayer. His forehead touched a slab of wet cardboard on the ground. His hands angled toward a plastic cup in which he hoped to gather enough money to reunite his family. In two hours at the window, I hadn’t seen anyone help him. No one carried cash anymore. When the rain intensified, he raised the hood of his poncho and kept praying.
I had my own problems. For months I’d been creatively stalled, and the night before, I had damaged my marriage in ways that I hoped would not prove enduring. I was in Norway for a reunion of the many descendants of Torvald and Marit, my spouse’s great-great-grandparents. I would have skipped the trip. Whereas, I argued—my spouse and I had met in law school—whereas she was merely one-eighth Norwegian; whereas we already had a travel-burdened year; whereas much of said travel’s purpose was to attend yet more events with her large, tight-knit family; whereas we had a dog we hated to leave and whose care cost money; and whereas I required long swaths of undisrupted routine to perform my creative vocation, the fragile magic of which my spouse apparently could not grasp but she’d have to take my word for it. Whereas all of the above, I thought, I should be entitled to stay home.
She had not forced me to come so much as she’d established that she would be very upset if I didn’t. She had colorable arguments on her side, too. Whereas Norway’s landscape was purportedly like nothing else; whereas she would empower me to design our entire non-reunion itinerary; whereas travel was not likely to get any simpler for us, for we were entering the years of potential child-rearing; and—here was her silver bullet—whereas she had been billing 300+ hours per month at her law firm and rarely got time off. Meanwhile I’d quit the law to write novels. I’d been telling people that my “quote-unquote ‘job’” involved a breakneck pace: whenever I wasn’t vigilantly loafing, I was in urgent repose. In other words my spouse earned all our money, and she did not buy the idea that Iwas somehow too busy for a vacation.
•
One thing I liked about the idea of Norway was that its men still seemed authorized to be interested in their own melancholy. Jon Fosse was soon to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in the U.S. was becoming known for Septology:a seven-volume, stream-of-consciousness novel set over a few winter days in the life of a narrator a lot like Jon Fosse. The City of Oslo had honored Edvard Munch, the painter of The Scream, by building the largest single-artist museum in the world. The museum occupied thirteen stories on the waterfront and featured subtly melancholic works like Self-Portrait in Hell. And of course there was Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose My Struggle, a conspicuously banal 3600-page autobiographical novel, spread across six volumes, had become popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
Eight years earlier, I’d stopped reading after the first volume of the Knausgaard, wondering who’d given this guy the right to bore us. But now, while I waited at JFK for my flight—my spouse was traveling for work in Asia and would meet me in Oslo—I downloaded the second volume of the Knausgaard as an audiobook. For a while I’d been unable to write anything interesting, so I was intrigued by the possibility that mundane prose about mundane experiences might become high literature if it grew long enough.
I held my phone over the scanner; a green light cleared me onto the jetway. I took my seat, placed headphones over my ears, and started the audiobook. By the time we were airborne, I was engaged with My Struggle’s Volume 2 as I had never been with Volume 1. I wondered if I was growing into it. Volume 2 was about Karl Ove falling in love and starting to have children, and meanwhile trying to write. He was anxious and pissed off about the same things that made me anxious and pissed off. Within a few minutes, I was riveted—and at the same time it was nice not to feel the need to rewind after I fell asleep for twenty minutes.
•
My spouse met me at the Oslo airport. Our faces were pale, greasy from all the travel. We kissed and told each other how bad we smelled, then made our way to the car rental desk, where I handed over my license and credit card. It was nice to act like I was paying for things.
They assigned us an electric Volvo SUV, the most Scandinavian possible car, and nicer than the compact we’d reserved. We drove it out of Oslo about two hours to the region from which my spouse’s family hailed. The route didn’t take us though the prettiest part of Norway, but still the terrain was all pristine lakes beside vast mountains, varied greens, soft clouds lingering in valleys, and so on. The landscape’s gratuitous gorgeousness registered in my fatigued mind as a visual cliché, generically picturesque, as sterile as a digital background across which our Volvo moved like a cursor: electronically, sealed against the vivid scenery, surrounded but untouched and untouching.
We found my spouse’s parents, uncles, and aunts in the hotel restaurant. I shook hands with my father-in-law, his big red arms emerging from a short-sleeve button-down whose fabric bore a pattern of little fisherman. My mother-in-law, who looked the way my spouse would look in thirty years, hugged me and said she had ordered us food before the kitchen closed for the afternoon. I greeted some aunts and uncles, and their conversation soon returned to the subjects it had been on before my spouse and I arrived. My in-laws were all bigger than me, physically or in personality, and usually both. My spouse and I were exhausted—my body still in New York, hers in Seoul—and I wanted more credit than I was getting for showing up. My spouse’s siblings, and all but one of her many first cousins, had declined to make the Norway trip. So I was here as the plus-one of a one-eighth Norwegian, and I’d been up for 26 hours, and no one was expressing much admiration for my sense of family duty. Why was I doing this—I scowled into my salmon toast—skipping days when I might well make creative breakthroughs, all for people who weren’t elated to see me?
•
In the afternoon, the full reunion convened at the old family church where some ancestors were buried. There had been four siblings in my spouse’s great-grandfather’s generation. Two brothers ended up in Canada, because they had no prospects in Norway, which itself had few prospects until striking oil in the 1960s. The two other siblings ended up on or near the original family farm. The Norwegians we were now meeting were these two siblings’ descendants—my spouse’s cousins in some form. I could see the family resemblance, especially in noses and eyes and in the way they stood, on dense agricultural legs.
We milled around the graveyard for a while, trying to figure out who we all were to each other. Only a few of the older cousins, the guys who had organized the reunion, seemed to understand the whole family diagram from the outset. I got a handle on things after receiving a reunion packet in which we were all ordered and numbered, like the subsections of a statute. My spouse was 4.3.2.2. I was 4.3.2.2A. My spouse’s second spouse, I pointed out to her, would presumably be 4.3.2.2B, and our future kid would be 4.3.2.2.1.
The church structure was 1000 years old and had been adapted from Catholic to Lutheran. Everyone sat in the cool pews to hear a lecture on the church’s history, and then the girlfriend of one of the cousins played a Green Day song on the piano. Another cousin, a woman in her 20s, sang a Norwegian folk tune about trying to sail without wind. She was incredibly self-possessed. From the fact that she did this impromptu, I inferred that average Norwegians had a powerful command of their folk culture. It turned out she was professionally trained. She taught music, theater, and dance in a town hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle that did not see the sun four months a year. I could see why such a place would value the performing arts.
After the church, we ate dinner in the yard of a small mountain farm that had been in the family for three generations. The surrounding hillside land remained in use, though the cousin who lived here no longer raised animals. After getting everyone a beverage, our host excused himself, pointing up at the absence of rain. “I must make hay while the sun shines,” he said in English. His tractor dragged an attachment that lined already cut grass into baleable rows. The rest of us ate deer sausage and moose burgers and watched evening light slowly, slowly, fill the valley. At this time of year, my mother-in-law said, the dusk would last for four hours before true darkness fell.
My spouse and I were being nice to each other, touching each other’s backs and elbows. Our shared exhaustion made us allies. We planned to get back to the hotel soon. But the small talk with the cousins wasn’t painful for me, actually. Maybe it was adrenaline, or that we had all been together in their ancestral church, listening to instrumental Green Day, but I felt connected with these people. I asked several cousins whether they liked Knausgaard. I couldn’t pronounce his name the Norwegian way, but they figured it out. One of the older organizer-cousins had just finished Volume 2. We agreed it was good, and he said that Knausgaard had really helped him reflect on his own life. I felt the same way, I said, at least about Volume 2 so far. I asked if Knausgaard’s prose was stylistically interesting in its original language. The cousin said he thought so. I said that Knausgaard was stylistically banal in English translation, but the books worked despite or maybe because of the boring prose. The cousin looked over my shoulder. I was boring him by talking about literary style.
•
Jet lag woke me at 2 AM. I went to the lobby and tried to write. For five minutes I poked at an illegible coffee machine, accidentally making myself both tea and hot chocolate before the night manager told me the machine was out of beans. Around 4 AM, the sky was already light again. Unable to manage any worthwhile writing, I’d listened to Karl Ove’s early passion with Linda calcifying into domesticity. They were getting pregnant. They were at war with the alcoholic Russian in the apartment below theirs, who blared music late at night and then accused them of being too loud. I hated the Russian. I wondered whether Knausgaard had decided on a maximalist form of novel just so he could describe in overwhelming detail what an asshole this neighbor had been. Karl Ove’s furies always made sense to me; I inhabited the fury with him. Whenever he wrote about how much he loved or enjoyed something, the object was usually his wife or kids—the kind of thing he had a duty to love or enjoy. I didn’t quite believe him. Obviously, I thought, at any given time when he was supposedly happy, he would have preferred to be writing.
•
My spouse slept for more than eleven hours. She was always a better sleeper than I was, but I especially envied her now. I woke her for the day’s first event. The reunion schedule said: “Dance Competition.”
Beneath a grey sky, we made our way to the town square, where I learned to my relief that we would be spectators, not competitors. An old man played accordion in a gazebo, beside which a temporary stage and judges’ tent had been built. My spouse and I ate fresh donuts out of paper bags, and the competition commenced when the Americans and the cousins and about a hundred other people had assembled.
Three local hotshots dominated the show. They swaggered around like Vikings assured they’d have their pick of women at the evening’s feast. Hakkon excelled at handsomeness and jumping far. Frederick excelled at flexibility and jumping high. The third guy—we missed his name, but my spouse and I decided he seemed like a Casey—did cool flips. One competition involved kicking a hat off the end of a high pole. Another tested endurance at a dance that I’d always thought was Russian, where you squat and kick one leg forward at a time. Casey won the gymnastics competition with a flip where he seemed to land directly on his head, pause, and then continue rotating forward onto his feet. His prize was a wood carving the size of a coffee table.
In the afternoon, most of our group walked to the Folkmuseum at the edge of town. The rain turned serious. The cousins repeatedly told us that Norwegians didn’t believe in bad weather, “only bad clothing.” I said I admired the extreme commitment to personal responsibility. My sneakers started squelching as we crossed a bridge and did not entirely dry out until a week later, back in New York.
At the Folkmuseum, a guide took us through antique houses that demonstrated the characteristic architecture and lifestyles of different periods in the Valdres region. The log houses, some roofed with grass, others with slate, had been moved to the museum’s land from nearby farms. Our guide brimmed with local pride and good humor. She led us through the rain without a hood. Inside a 400-year-old house, she played a song on the Hardanger fiddle, a 9-string violin whose timbre I recognized from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. I drifted nearly to sleep while listening. The guide teased me for sleeping, then explained that, traditionally, Norwegians slept sitting up, based on the idea that you could lie down when you died. Often more than 15 to a room, the men would sleep against the walls, the women near the stove. That was patriarchal, the guide conceded, but also it was nice for the women. They got to be warmer.
•
Somehow, during our afternoon break, my spouse was able to sleep more. Was she ill? I leaned against the headboard beside her. Our hotel bed was actually two twin mattresses, pressed together. A Scandinavian thing. My body refused to go down in the daylight. I tried to write but couldn’t focus. I listened to Knausgaard. Karl Ove’s wife had gone through rough labor. Now they were bickering about childcare. Their infant threw tantrums and was constantly being installed into, or extracted from, rompers. The whole thing sounded awful—and I was convinced my spouse and I were headed for a similar future. We were already discussing the same problems: logistics, daycares, remodeling an apartment we also had to simultaneously live in. I had never so intensely dreaded child-rearing. At the same time, children had never seemed more necessary. As I listened, I traced my fingers through the reunion pamphlet, noting the short lines where the flow the family delta halted. After certain names came words of bleak disappointment: “No children.” We were these names’ closest living relations, but no one was a direct descendant, and no one in even this quite family-oriented family knew much about them.
•
The final day of the reunion, we took a small bus to the “mountain farm” where the family used to bring their cows in the summers, after the land at lower altitudes had been picked clean. We had an old photo of my spouse’s great-great-grandmother standing outside this farmhouse. I took a picture of my spouse in the same pose. The house was tiny and still had no electricity. The group gathered under a tent and took turns going inside to warm up by the fire. “No bad weather, only bad clothing,” one cousin repeated, before admitting that he should have worn rain pants. Another cousin did tattoo removal and showed us a picture of a tattoo that had recently taken her ten sessions to obliterate. The words had been in English, in ornate letters spanning a guy’s whole chest; they’d said “Regret Nothing.”
After the big photo—taken by a neighbor from atop a ladder—I spent the afternoon circulating, maintaining constant motion so that I wouldn’t have to converse for more than a few seconds at a time. I served myself tiny portions of food so that I would always have to go back for more. I’d slept fine but somehow felt less energetic than I had the last few days. I’d lost my curiosity about the reunion. It was almost over.
Finally, I stopped pacing and sat in a camping chair. I fussed with a traditional sour cream porridge, certain that no one could ever have wanted food to taste like this. One of the third cousins sat next to me. She announced, with a directness that I had come to appreciate about the Norwegians, that she wanted to talk to me about the artist’s life. She worked as a therapist—but she also painted, she now told me. The spare bedroom in her apartment was her studio. My spouse soon sat with us and listened as we talked about artistic work.
We talked about how so much of it is a grind, but you have to show up constantly so that you can be there on the days when you surprise yourself, and about how there is nothing better than that occasional feeling of openness and spontaneity, of an idea flowing into and then out of you in one movement, when you discover an unexpected expertness in your content and form. We talked about balance—how artists have to be alone a lot, but also they have to be exposed to the world, otherwise they get cramped and narrow, and that the trick seems to be to catch your creativity as you swing between these poles of being too alone or too distracted. We agreed that having children in the house might be prohibitive, even as we agreed that children would be a big piece of life to sacrifice for the sake of art.
My spouse was giving me a look. I didn’t often talk about “my process.” I thought it could not possibly interest other people, especially not non-artists who were married to me. But maybe, I thought, I’d never put things to my spouse as clearly as I was putting them to her third cousin.
Then we were done; the reunion was over. The American wing of the family boarded the bus back to the hotel. In ninety minutes, my spouse and I would be driving west in our electric Volvo. I had decided to be optimistic about the rest of the trip: another six days in Norway, just my spouse and me. We would go where we chose and do what we chose—largely what I chose. She had promised me time every day to write. I could picture myself gazing out the windows of tidy, minimalist hotel rooms, being drawn into a fertile mindset by the grandeur of the fjords. I would finally achieve a creative flow.
The bus pulled over. Was there another reunion event? I flipped through the pamphlet for some explanation. I wanted to weep. It turned out that one of the second cousins, a little overeager as a host, had decided to stop the bus at his friend’s farm, for it was essential for his guests to see some fine cows and goats up close. Did he think America didn’t have those?
•
Four days later, we hustled our luggage from the train into the hotel at Finse, changed clothes in the lobby bathroom, left our bags, and jogged toward the meeting point for the day’s glacier hike, for which we were running late. I trotted ahead, excited: this was the only day of the trip I’d been looking forward to when we booked our flights.
Finse was not quite a town. It lay atop a mountain range and was accessible only by footpath or by the train we’d taken. Its sole commerce was one backpacker lodge and one fancier hotel, where we were staying. The structure that held the backpacker lodge had been built by Nazis to facilitate study of the arctic climate. A few decades later, George Lucas had come here to shoot the scenes set on Hoth, the ice planet in The Empire Strikes Back. The hotel’s old guest books, available for current guests to flip through, contained notes from Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, though not, as far as I could tell, notes from any Nazis.
On the train, I’d finished listening to Volume 2. Karl Ove and Linda now had three kids. Their oldest child had told someone at daycare that her parents were angry all the time. Karl Ove and Linda each darted to take the greater share of responsibility for poor parenting. They were at their respective wits’ ends. Later, Karl Ove and Linda hugged, agreeing that they had to break their cycle of domestic stress and failure. Immediately after this conversation, Karl Ove went to his desk, opened a new document, and began writing the description of his own face’s reflection that would open My Struggle—the project that would consume him for years.
What a resolution! I thought. He was starting an inspired project! From now on, Karl Ove would live with artistic purpose. That would be good for his mindset and for his whole family. How many times had I dreamed that for myself? I knew, but it seemed somehow beside the point, that publication of the first two volumes of My Struggle had driven the real-life Linda into a psychiatric institution.
I deleted the Volume 2 audiobook from the memory of my phone, removed my headphones, and looked out the window of what was purported to be world’s prettiest train ride. The last four days had been a bust, creatively and emotionally. I’d had time to write, but I hadn’t used it well. My spouse kept sleeping 11 hours per night, and we hadn’t had much to say to each other, besides commenting on what we saw and ate. As the train approached Finse, my spouse brought up a layout problem with our apartment. We’d had the same conversation a hundred times. I heard her out for as long as I could tolerate and then reinstalled my headphones. I started Volume 3, about Karl Ove’s boyhood and his severe father. But I was bored or distracted or both; the words were mere sounds, and I closed my eyes against the world’s prettiest train ride for a while.
When we arrived, panting slightly, at the glacier hike meeting point, the guide looked us up and down and announced we were not properly attired. He pointed to my sneakers and to the absence of the waterproof pants that some email had apparently told us to wear. I said that we didn’t mind getting a little wet—in fact we’d been a little wet for several days straight. He said he didn’t want any whining. “Some people get cold,” he said, “and their minds go”—he gestured as if cracking a tropical fruit. I promised him we’d do our whining out of earshot. He liked that. He was an English mountaineer who had recently retired after 41 years in the British Army. I felt myself aligning in the ambivalent way I always did in relation to particularly charismatic men: at once determined to exceed his expectations and to, conversely, establish my own status in an independent system of values and achievement. The guide gave me a couple sets of crampons to put in my backpack.
Our group hiked toward the base of the glacier, a trek of about two hours. The landscape was gentle but stark—most of the year, the guide said, all of this—he waved an arm to encompass everything—was covered in ten feet of snow. A lake to our right had been frozen solid until two weeks earlier. Three of the other hikers in our group were a Norwegian family: a mother, her twelve-year-old son, and his stepdad. The son said he’d been on a glacier once before and asked knowledgeable questions, in English, that our guide seemed delighted to answer.
The other five members of our group were a family from San Francisco. They reawakened my dread of childrearing. This family was bourgeois without any apparent anxiety. The dad banked; the mom sold real estate in wine country; the kids were rude. With everything in the dad’s life, like their vacation house or the e-bike he rode to work, he told you right away what it had cost. At lunch, the mom fussed with the kids’ sandwiches and tried to persuade them to eat hard-boiled eggs, one of which I ended up eating. The dad, leaning in confidentially, asked our guide whether he’d ever fired a weapon in combat. Yes, our guide said. He had been in Iraq, Afghanistan—everywhere the U.K. or NATO had been at war since the Falklands. The dad nodded with his mouth turned down, as if the guide had finally earned his hard-won respect, then tried to relate by describing the plot of Lone Survivor, a Mark Wahlberg movie based on something that had happened in Afghanistan. Our guide said he didn’t especially like war movies. The fifteen-year-old son, mute until now, asked for the guide’s “kill count.”
Our guide held the boy’s gaze for five seconds, then said, “That probably seems like a pretty cool question to you, doesn’t it?”
I turned my head, hiding my grin at the kid’s humiliation—though of course I’d been wondering the same thing.
After lunch, we stepped into crampons, and the group tied itself together with a single purple rope, threading the rope through loops in our harnesses. The guide explained that the essential thing was to ensure that the rope stayed taut. “Inertia,” he said, “do we all understand it?” If we each minded the segments before and behind us, no one would get hurt, the guide said. It was inattention to the line that killed people. When someone fell on a slack rope, that person could build momentum and inertia and yank others along. But if the rope stayed taut, no one would be capable of falling very far or fast; the inertia of the group would overpower the inertia of any unfortunate individual. My spouse and I shared a look as we came to understand that our lives would depend on these people from San Francisco. The egg-refusing teenagers seemed more than likely to plunge through a snow bridge. I squeezed my spouse’s hand, wanting to suggest that, if the need arose, I would somehow have the skills to protect her, and the group climbed several hundred feet up to the ice field.
It did feel like Hoth, some other planet. The ice made the sky whiter. The guide’s leathery, stubbled face lit up as he brought us to steep crevasses and held the rope so we could lean out over his favorite moulins—vertical tunnels through which streams of surface water plummeted. These streams worked their way under the ice and helped the glacier move, a few feet every year. Our guide impressed upon us the ice’s power to gouge through mountains. This glacier, he said, stretched thirty miles beyond what we could see.
As we moved to the glacier’s edge, where the ice met mountain rock and formed steep, frozen waves, our crampons carving in at angles, my ankles quivering, I was gripped by a religious feeling. Terror. I felt our puny fragility—the eleven of us, tied together on the rippling shoulder of a monster that could not feel us. My fear was intense, but it was also the reason I’d come. I focused on each crunching step and on the tension in the rope. I listened to my spouse’s breath behind me, feeling her every hesitation in the rope that connected us. When we skirted the final crevasse and left the glacier, I was beaming for the first time in days, perhaps months.
I talked to our guide for most of the hike back. He told me that he’d gone to military school at 15, after being convicted of arson. His whole Army career, he said, he’d moved incessantly and rarely worked with the same person for more than eighteen months straight. He said he liked how his life was always changing—in the spring, he would leave Finse to guide high-net-worth climbers in the Himalayas—but he did regret that all his friendships were so temporary. No marriages, no children. He said he’d often wished for a more rooted life, for more “tribal feeling,” but that he knew it was too late for him. He had lost whatever habits allowed people to build community.
I told him I was a novelist and instantly felt his respect for me grow; he was used to guiding Americans who worked at tech companies, hedge funds, law firms. I didn’t tell him I’d been a lawyer until recently. At war in Afghanistan, he said, he had started writing poetry during long helicopter rides. He was now trying to write his memoirs, but writing was difficult. “You need a lot of strength up here,” he said, pointing at his skull. “Yeah,” I agreed. We talked about masculinity, leadership, art, and aging. I tried not to seem any tougher or more familiar with military life than I was, and I thought he appreciated that I wasn’t putting anything on, the way the San Francisco dad had been. At the end of the tour, the guide and I shook hands, communicating through manly eye contact our mutual understanding of the connection we had established.
That evening, my spouse and I cuddled with cocktails in the fancy hotel’s lobby, watching the dusk inch through the mountains. For the first time all trip, I was glad not to be writing—or maybe I felt as if I had been writing. She tousled my hair, and I felt strong and humble, accomplished and small. I’d had a rich day of the kind I knew I couldn’t have had at my laptop.
•
The next night, in Oslo, I reflected as I put myself to bed early on where the day had gone awry, how the rope between spouse and me had fallen slack. One mistake had come in the afternoon when—after the Munch Museum and a floating sauna, in a loud hotel room above the Oslo train station—I’d tried to write about the glacier and discovered I could remember hardly anything about it. I could not recall what it had felt like on the glacier, what I had thought about, or even what the guide and I had discussed; I retained only impressionistic images and a vague sense that the experience had been meaningful. I couldn’t even remember the guide’s name. You dipshit, I said to myself. You asshole. I came down hard on myself, on my flimsy memory and concentration. I hated being a writer, a quote-unquote job that required me to constantly pretend to be more attentive and retentive than I was.
That was how my mood had soured. But my real mistake had come at dinner, when my spouse brought up our apartment again. Whereas the front hallway was not maneuverable with a stroller; whereas the bathroom was in the wrong place; whereas whereas whereas . . . She was just filling the air, but I felt myself suffocating in the absence of anything new to say. Before I knew it I’d been short with her—more than short with her. I said that our apartment was fine, that we would make due, that new parents regularly made due with far less than we had. I used the words “sense of entitlement.”
“Can’t you see I’m suffering?” She said. “I’m exhausted. I’m in pain. I don’t understand how you can be so indifferent to me.”
“What,” I said—delighting in the clean point I was about to land—“does that have to do with remodeling?”
My spouse stared at her delicious crudo and regretted marrying me. My delight evaporated as quickly as it had come. I thought about the punishing reality of the billable hour, how it had often similarly inflamed my desire to spend money just to justify the pain of earning it. I thought about how she’d spent half of her vacation asleep and how she’d been clutching her stomach after meals, plagued by an ulcer that stress prevented from healing. Was I really as helpless to help her as I felt? Or was I incompatible with my spouse in some perhaps genetic sense—lacking the grace, grit, and forbearance she deserved. I could feel her comparing me to the hardy, even-tempered mountain stock from which she derived, thinking that perhaps it would be best after all if someone like me did not raise her children. My dark eyes could recognize in her pale Nordic eyes the growth of the harshest moral doubts I had about myself, my mean and stingy spirit. Over dessert I apologized, and she thanked me for apologizing. We’d held hands as we walked back to our hotel. Still, I was putting myself to bed early, before I said anything else I’d regret.
•
On our last day in the country, we’d planned to visit Oslo’s sculpture gardens. I wanted to make up for my sharpness from the prior night, but I’d slept badly and still couldn’t be a good sport. After lunch, I told my spouse that she’d have more fun without me. She didn’t argue. She was walked around by herself while I went to the world’s self-proclaimed greatest public library.
Over the brim of my laptop, I looked out the window at the refugee praying in the rain. We’d passed the refugee yesterday, when it was sunny, and he had displayed a printed photo of his absent family, the kids he wanted to see again. I thought about leaving the library, finding an ATM, getting some cash, and giving it to him. But who would do that? Such a rupture of social conventions, and of my character, seemed somehow monstrous—generous, obviously, but so aggressive. It was my spouse’s money anyway.
Instead of helping the refugee or even writing, I let my laptop fall dark and tried to think of something nice to say to my spouse on the flight home. I considered telling her that my skepticism about Norway had proven wrong, that overall I had enjoyed the trip, and maybe that I even felt closer to her family and heritage. We’d had other vacations like that, where I started off reluctant but managed to get in the spirit. But I didn’t want to lie to her, and in any case she’d never believe me. She knew I’d spent the whole vacation, except on the glacier, wishing I was home and working, and she knew I’d taken it out on her in a way she didn’t take things out on me.
We didn’t really enjoy each other again until about two weeks later, back home, after she showed me a photo of a bathroom whose tiling she liked. I said I liked it too, relieved to learn that remodeling our place for kids was still, in her mind, the plan. By then we were back in our routines. She’d finally slept off whatever ailment had laid her low. I was finally showing up for my writing. We’d cut the dog’s hair short for summer, and he was happy.
I had also since getting home abandoned Knausgaard’s Volume 3. In its place, I started the audiobook of Jon Fosse’s Septology. The whole seven-part novel was a single sentence running in the head of an old, childless Norwegian painter. The narrator was a humble egomaniac. I supposed anyone would be, spending so much time alone. All he thought about was his late wife, his art, his neighbors, his soul, and driving. The prose was priestly and rhythmic. Fosse wrote about love and God with the same naïve simplicity that he used to describe small talk. The book was a deep experience that, even more than generously My Struggle, forgave short naps by the listener. It didn’t make me anxious the way the Knausgaard had. I think it made me feel love, and that I was able to share some of that extra love with my spouse. We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
Julius Taranto
Julius Taranto is the author of How I Won a Nobel Prize.