The Longest Fjord

By TOM SHONE

October 25, 2009

THE DISCOVERER

By Jan Kjaerstad

Translated by Barbara Haveland

448 pp. Open Letter. $17.95

Reviewing books doesn’t often feel like real work — not the kind of work that makes you break a sweat or join a union. So when an editor from The New York Times calls you up and asks if you want to review a new novel from Norway, and the novel turns out to be not only over 400 pages long and largely set in a fjord, but also Part 3 of a trilogy, Parts 1 and 2 of which ran to over 1,000 pages, with multiple narrators and a nonlinear time scheme — yeesss — then you jump at the chance to take your place as a worker among workers.

Jan Kjaerstad’s novel “The Discoverer” completes a trilogy about a Norwegian broadcaster named Jonas Wergeland, which is a relief. If someone hadn’t completed a trilogy about Jonas Wergeland, he might have had something to say about it. The maker of “Thinking Big,” a TV series about Norway’s most illustrious figures, like Ibsen and Grieg — “a feat unparalleled in the history of modern Norwegian thought” — Jonas is a Viking among men, a lifesaver, a lion. Possessed of “a brain as sharp and polished as a great diamond,” he can keep four trains of thought going at once; he also has a “magic penis” he can shape at will, to bring any woman to the brink of cyclonic orgasm: “I drove into her as if giving a standing ovation.” Does he mean receiving one? Standing sounds unwise.

Hey, it’s Kjaerstad’s trilogy. Why not? He can hang his hero like a stallion if he so chooses, although someone should have told him that the interests of dramatic texture, not to mention modesty, might have been better served by a fault or two. True, the second book in the series found Wergeland standing trial for the murder of his wife, during which time the whole of Norway, we are given to believe, was whipped to heights of O.J.-like hysteria. “It was said that a number of women had tried to kill themselves, that they had been found clutching photographs of Jonas Wergeland. He had been an incandescent, edifying icon to the people of Norway, exalted and inviolable.” Given that Jonas makes documentaries about Ibsen for a living — think James Lipton in Viking horns — this seems unlikely, but no matter: the murder charge was a welcome dent in the halo of Kjaerstad’s protagonist.

The conclusion of the trilogy is bent, boringly, on exoneration. The genius really is a genius. Now freed from prison, Wergeland takes a boat trip up the Sognefjord, the longest fjord in the world, alongside a scientific team whose “main concern appears to be that the actual concept, its sum and substance, the thinking behind it, should be applicable to lots of forms, including some yet to come.” No, I have no idea what they’re doing on that boat either, it being Kjaerstad’s habit, as it is Salman Rushdie’s, to offload his own fondness for multiform imagining onto every member of his supporting cast without noticing how uniform it makes everything. A rainbow, endlessly extended, blurs into sludge. Everybody in Wergeland’s world seems to waft around on such unfeasible levels of pre-eminence, from the “famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions” to the “internationally renowned and much sought-after fountain designer,” that the reader longs to make the acquaintance of a long-distance truck driver or seamstress.

Kjaerstad is, you realize, just the teensiest bit hung up about greatness. The trilogy has been praised as an attempt to do for Norway what Joyce did for Ireland in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” — to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. It’s more like 1,500 pages of air guitar in a neo-Nietzschean vein, less a great novel than an overextended riff on greatness’s trimmings and one itinerant soul’s hunger for them. Which is another way of saying that Kjaerstad writes well about adolescence (there’s a great account of a breakup in here, set to the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”). Kjaerstad’s yoyo-ing self-regard is, you realize, perfectly pitched to the devastations and exaggerations of the teenage ego. But to find that tone — preening, self-absorbed, boastful — surviving well into adulthood, unchanged by heartbreak, marriage or even the death of a wife, is to conclude that you have just spent the best part of three weeks in the company of a solipsistic jerk.

Here, for instance, is Jonas responding to the alarming sight of his wife bashing her head against the wall: “I felt my thoughts shooting off in lots of directions at once, as if the sight of her had provoked an amazing shift in consciousness, so powerful that for a while I forgot about her and instead stood there with all of my attention focused inwards as I attempted to pursue as many as possible of the countless lines of thought which were branching outwards at breathtaking speed and which might, if I could only mobilize all of my powers, lead me to some unique flash of insight which would justify the fact that I did not intervene.” Readers, I predict, will find themselves torn among one of three reactions: (1) “Keep banging, honey! Knock yourself out for me!”; (2) “That is so true”; and (3) “Where did I put the new Lorrie Moore?”

Wherever Moore comes from in the literary universe, Kjaerstad comes from the opposite end: megalomaniac, irony-free, possessed of an Olympian disregard for the recognizably human. Kjaerstad has said he wants to leave open the question of whether or not Jonas killed his wife. What does it say about his writing that after three books, more than 1,500 pages and as many narrators as there are members of Abba, he achieves that aim? The last we see of Jonas he is on a deck chair, alone, still sprouting fresh virtues — clairvoyance, a third lung, even the first shootlets of self-awareness. “I saw now what I had lacked in my Project X: a person at the center. A person who was someone other than myself.” It’s a little late for that.

Tom Shone’s first novel, “In The Rooms,” will be published next year.