Colliding, Exploding, Collapsing: On Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only”

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Love drives you crazy. What’s falling in love but losing yourself to someone else, crashing your world headlong into theirs, destroying them both and creating something new? This pell-mell collision, the madness of love, which never ceases to shift, surprise, and constantly reassert itself in the lives of the people involved, is rendered in full in Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only, recently translated into English by Charlotte Barslund. It is a book that’s impossible to put down, with each episode, each chapter of its central romance dragging its reader deeper into this same, wild madness of its protagonists.  

Hjorth, across her novels, chronicles this strain of desire with uncomfortable, painful accuracy, portraying what it is to hold someone else in your mind, to devote so much of your attention to them, their life, their well-being, even while you live and work in separate worlds. Sometimes they barely know you exist. Worse, sometimes they want nothing to do with you. In contemporary life, where our attention is increasingly commodified even as time feels scarce, this type of obsessive love, the type experienced mostly at a distance, feels both more common and more sinister. In a time where people are cautious to step into relationships, love still sweeps us away, painfully and without mercy, rarely coming at the right time. After waiting two weeks for a text that never comes, or for a summer fling to fully commit, we’re left wondering, why did I put myself through all of that, only to wind up in the same place? These feelings are as earnest as they are desperate, as noble as they are pathetic. If Only asks its readers to share this journey with its protagonist, and ultimately, to take seriously the urgency and agency we have in our own lives. 

Hjorth’s novel captures the aching frustration and sheer ecstasy contained in pedestrian, doomed romantic relationships, centered around an affair between two lovers, Ida and Arnold. Ida, a playwright and young mother, and Arnold, a Brecht scholar with tenure-backed charisma, meet at a work conference, connecting after he stands up, stubbornly, to a younger academic during a Q&A. She approaches him at a bar, and soon they’re going back to the hotel together. With their spouses out of mind, this single night outside their normal lives comes to transform their next decade. Shortly after the conference, they begin writing to each other, across three hundred miles from her home in Oslo to his in Trondheim, then they begin to talk on the phone, until, eventually, they meet again. The relationship that follows is defined by near-identical weekends away, often in continental Europe, on beaches and hotels away from their day-to-day responsibilities. Even when they are only seeing one another (Ida divorces her husband just months after she meets Arnold, while he delays separating from his wife for years into their affair), Ida and Arnold are never quite able to build a home, or a life, entirely together. There’s no questioning their passion for one another, the way they drive each other mad. Yet, when standing on the threshold, almost literally, of long-term domesticity, of “settling down,” the spark is gone.  

If Only, apparently, is the fictionalization of a real-life relationship Vigdis Hjorth had in the early 2000s, somewhat of an open secret in the Norwegian literary world. Writing frankly about sex and her desire for it earned Hjorth the derisive label of “erotic novelist” by the Norwegian press. Yet, despite her reputation for drawing from her own life, Hjorth insists that her work be categorized as fiction, and her novels’ projects are as stylistic as they are substantive. Unlike other preeminent writers known for “autofiction”—including, notably, her countryman Karl Ove Knausgaard whose insistence on the truth of his works is central to his practice and literary reputation—Hjorth’s categorization of her own work as fiction allows her to control its effect as well as the stories she tells. In Hjorth’s work, there is a playfulness to telling the truth, even if it is a dark truth or an embarrassing one. She dares her readers to stick with her protagonists, no matter how broken down they become, and as a result, she produces fiction that is daring in its willingness to face human loneliness head-on. Thus her practice is that of a storyteller, illuminating these everyday realities through her work, rather than the kind of confessional-style reportage that’s associated with Knausgaard, or the reflective admission of someone like Annie Ernaux. 

So then, stylistically, where is the eroticism in a book that is so much about obsession, love at a distance, and the mania of missing someone? On every page and in every line. Although maintaining the distance of the third person narration, the perspective remains so close to Ida’s that the reader can’t help but slip into her pain, feel each moment along with her, get dragged over the same coals. With one event falling after another, If Only feels impossible to put down, inexplicably, dizzyingly, confoundingly so. The novel rides Ida’s highs and lows as she waits on pins and needles for Arnold’s letters, phone calls, confirmations of plans and of his feelings. Especially painful, and especially resonant, are the moments of instant, sharp regret—when she flies off the handle or exposes herself too fully, and tries to walk back what’s already been said or sent. Just a few months into their affair, she hears that he’s gone home with a student from his department. Her sister, studying at the university up north, calls her to let her know that Arnold is having an affair with one of his students, that she is not the only person he wants to see outside of his marriage.  She “can’t help but write to him: SHAGGER, SLEEPING WITH YOUR STUDENTS YOU ABSOLUTE SHIT, I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!” After posting the letter, she sends another one taking it back, and waits an agonizing week for his response, which simply shrugs off her concern.  

Part of the strange madness of falling in love is how the object of our desire haunts us in their absence. Romance happens not just during time spent together physically, but the time spent together when you are apart, thinking of each other when we’re not in the same place. Now more than ever, after the lockdown years and with the ubiquity of location sharing, social media, FaceTime . . . it feels increasingly the norm that two people in a relationship are in communication at all times, even as the time we have available to actually spend together shrinks. Your lover is the person who texts you back. Attention, more than ever, seems to be the way people express and demand desire, and our capacity to give our free attention to one another seems as though it’s dwindling, especially in-person. Reading about Ida waiting next to the phone, I think about all the texts I’ve waited for, the names I’ve prayed would show up on my screen. The way I’ll scramble across my bed when my phone buzzes, just to see another Terrace Bagel coupon code. In the most painful, driven moments of If Only, Ida vividly imagines Arnold’s life without her. What he’s doing, who he’s taking home, what he’s reading. The relief that comes from seeing each other every so often, and then even for the period of time when they live together, is never enough to keep her mind off of him when they are apart. So maybe Hjorth is telling us, the most successful relationships are the ones you can forget about for a time, that you can trust to be there if you take your mind off of them. Maybe the harder we try to hold on, the more difficult it becomes to stay connected.

Hjorth is a writer who, as Toril Moi articulated recently, centers characters who are searching for everyday closeness, for the kind of pedestrian, close relationships one might take for granted with the urgent, epic emotional scale of Greek tragedy. Hjorth’s characters’ desperate desire for solid partners—or often, for comforting mothers—magnify the absence of those things from their lives. Even when Ida and Arnold connect, when they are in a solid relationship with one another, things cannot go smoothly. Still living apart, Ida returns home to thirty-two unanswered phone messages from Arnold. The next morning, he’s still calling and he’s still apoplectic. “He wails, he hiccups and gasps for air. He has never been like this before, he has never done anything like this before, it is only now that he is with Ida. He doesn’t have the energy to get up. He is all alone in the world. He can’t take it anymore. He wants to die.” This is one tantrum among many. Ida hops on a plane and flies to Trondheim, sweeping up the mess he’s made of his home, the furniture he’s smashed and the plates he shattered while waiting for her to call him back, and reestablishes a tenuous equilibrium between them. Hjorth’s writing is squarely focused on the heartache of everyday people, and of the individual lives and relationships it builds and destroys. Yet her characters don’t feel like paragons or stand-ins for types of people, and her novels are not allegories. They are exercises in honest emotional observation of what it’s like to reach out to someone else, and get little in return. 

What feels distinct in Hjorth’s writing is that she never seems to judge her protagonists or ask her readers to experience them from a great distance. They are not spectacles for us to watch and wring our hands over, but instead they provide the filter into their stories, and the reader’s task is to ache alongside them. This tactic—aligning the reader’s emotional receptiveness with the protagonist’s—feels especially rooted in empathy, and is in some ways a sentimental challenge to the prevailing style of contemporary literary fiction. Especially in the most socially-conscious novels about women searching for love, in which the author makes pains to distance her politics, perspective, and disposition from that of her main character. Brilliant writers are writing brilliant buffoons with brilliant voices. If Only, refreshingly, offers the exact opposite, with no less brilliance. There is no ironic distance, just pure emotion. Rather than putting the reader in a place of judgement or analysis, Hjorth’s reader’s judgement is placed stride-for-stride with the protagonist, however irrational she may be. 

In the end, the reader of If Only is as rocked by the affair as Ida; there are no answers. If you stick around to the end of the book waiting for a blowout, for some sort of epic conclusion, you won’t find one. Instead, returning to the book’s opening scene, the final moments of the novel arrive at Ida in a train station, sipping coffee and writing. Its climax is reflection. The narration veers into the first person, away from the teeth-rattling close-third that’s been driving both story and reader wild from the beginning. It’s unclear whether this means Ida had been telling her own story from a slight distance, or if the author herself is stepping forward to speak the title, ruefully: “If only there was a cure, a cure for love.” Ida and Arnold’s relationship is over for as little reason as it began. Was its purpose to sap the love out of her, to make sure that she wouldn’t have access to this feeling again? Or is it that love had simply run its course? Had it died “like books die,” circling around people’s lives, their conversations, until it’s forgotten on some bottom shelf, and eventually fades away into obscurity? How many times have we found ourselves at the end of our relationships thinking . . . what the fuck was the point of all that? 

Time has passed. I’ve read your books and pet your cats, but after two years, I still feel more or less like the same person. Should you have changed me? At the same time, I look around and things have indeed changed. I ice my knees after long runs these days. I have a new job. Better shoes. The Pope is a Sox fan. The miracle of If Only is that its frenzy ends in calm, that Ida names these changes, with only a hint of bitterness and the simultaneous deep patience and urgent, desperate loneliness of an artist. The only way to keep making is to keep making—connections, works of art, love. It takes foolish bravery to carry on. It is all we can do.