IN THE WAKE

IN THE WAKE by Per Petterson. Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2006 (originally published in Norway under the title I KJØLVANNET by Forlaget Oktober A/S, in 2000). Hardcover. 202 pages. Estimated length of the novel: around 60,000 words.

Writing is a difficult job. I think there's even a hint of the self-punishing masochist in most writers. On a bad day, when the right words aren't coming to you, it's actually excruciating to try to put pen to paper, or to sit in front of a computer screen with a blank document staring back at you. True, on better days when the words are coming to you with relative ease and things are going well, writing can bring you satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment. But those not-so-great moments when you're blocked or frustrated make you question whether the good days are really worth the effort. It seems insane to go through so much grief for so little pleasure.

Perhaps this is why there are many books in the global literary canon about the frustrations of writing and the inability to communicate effectively, even just to communicate as one human being to another. Meanings often slip between intentions, words, and the impact that those words have on others. Our very human tendency to have such slippages is probably one of the core reasons that many of us read--to get a little closer to understanding the mystery of communicating with words.

In Per Petterson's novel IN THE WAKE, we are confronted with one such lost soul, named Arvid. He's a published novelist who now can't seem to write much, as well as being an intensely emotional person who can't seem to connect satisfyingly with others or the world around him. He's divorced and lives by himself in an apartment. Apparently he doesn't see a lot of his wife and kids. He seems to traipse through life haunted by memories of the death of his father, mother, and two younger brothers in a tragic ferry accident (the novel is supposed to have been inspired by an actual fatal ferry incident). He has a conflicted relationship with the one other surviving member of his immediate family, an older brother, even though the two of them seem to be in similar psychological stages in their lives. Both Arvid and his surviving brother, age 43 and 46 respectively, are going through midlife crises and adjusting to breakups with their wives.

But Arvid, unlike his more practical older brother, is a dreamer. And, being a dreamy sort of guy, Arvid informs us that he has trouble distinguishing between his dreams and reality and what he reads in books:

"I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books."

Thus Arvid tells us his tale in a series of desultory reflections on events and people from his past and present. There's a surreal, wandering-without-a-goal quality to much of his narrative.

The seemingly defeated listlessness of the narrator pervades the book, lending it a contemporary feeling of alienation and isolation. There's even Arvid's acquaintance with a Kurdish neighbor, a man who speaks almost no Norwegian, and this mostly nonverbal relationship is symptomatic of Arvid's need to overcome barriers that keep getting in the way of his interactions with other people in his life.

The most warmth that Arvid shows is in his sexual bond with a woman who lives with her son across the street. But even this intimate relationship eventually results in the book's most theatrical anxiety attack, when he wakes up and realizes that she is not in bed next to him:

"I am alone. I slide my arm over the pillow, it is still warm, but she has not left a note. I do not want to be alone. I jump out of bed and run into the hall. In the mirror I see a face, and I stop and without thinking grab the first thing I see, a metal box standing on the chest, and hurl it at the mirror. The glass breaks with an incredibly loud noise, it disintegrates into glittering fragments raining silver on the floor, and I stand there watching them spread all over the hall like the aftermath of an explosion in a film on TV. One of the fragments slices into my arm and blood trickles out, not much but enough to show red against the white skin. I raise my arm and lick the blood up..."

The passage seems reminiscent of the films of Ingmar Bergman--the persona shatters as the mirror shatters, at the moment of the character's contemplation of his image. The blood-sucking is also symbolic of the protagonist's sense of his own enervation and wasting away as "one of the middle-aged forgotten."

But something seems missing from the turmoil of the book. It's not as pungent as it needs to be. As a reader, I felt blocked from Arvid's many ordeals--his ordeals as a writer, a husband, a father, a lover, a brother, and a person haunted by the past. Everything that happens, no matter the various particulars, seemed to be covered in a drab sameness. When the moments of high anxiety finally did occur--such as the crashing of the mirror in the panic of isolation--I didn't feel the visceral impact I might have if the author had explored Arvid's fears and fetishes more fully. And I wonder if any writer down on his luck would keep so relatively quiet about not being able to concentrate on writing much of anything. I yearned for a better understanding of his despair and emotional confusion. I'm not asking for pretentious explanations of why he did this or that or thought this or that, of course.  I just would have appreciated more vivid depictions of what was going on with him, and inside him.

And yet the book does succeed in creating an atmosphere of estrangement that suggests multiple states of consciousness, even if none of those states of consciousness are developed to the degree I desired. Although the lead character needs more penetrating development and more of the spontaneous abandon that flows from such development, Per Petterson is an intriguing author who, at his best, artfully combines fleeting impressions to create scenes that are something like collages.

The American edition of IN THE WAKE that I read is nicely packaged, and the book-cover image--of a hand reaching upward through multiple layers of whirling water without grabbing on to anything--is evocative of the protagonist's ineptness in forging connections with others. Regarding the manuscript, the text of the American edition that I read contains a few too many errors and was not proofread carefully enough. I hate to be a pedantic sourpuss about this, but I hope the American publisher will try to correct the errors in future printings and editions of IN THE WAKE.