Book in the spotlight: The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard
If there is one writer uniquely qualified to write about Faustian bargains, it is Karl Ove Knausgaard. His My Struggle, a six-volume memoiristic juggernaut dressed up as a novel featuring Karl Ove Knausgaard as both narrator and main protagonist, made the Norwegian author an international literary celebrity. It also led to legal action on the part of aggrieved relatives, the demise of his marriage, and, by his own confession, a permanent feeling of guilt. The ultimate price might have been artistic. The dogged conflation of the author and his literary creation has turned Knausgaard into a prisoner of the biographical; his real struggle now is to prove to his readers, if not to himself, that he is as good writing about things he doesn’t know as he is about things he knows. The novel The School of Night is Knausgaard’s latest attempt to show the reading world he is a lot more than the bard of ambitious writers besieged by their children’s diapers.
In this modern restatement of the Faustian myth, Knausgaard takes aim at the heart of the Western canon. Kristian Hadeland is a young Norwegian studying photography in mid-1980s London. Ambitious, solitary, and misanthropic, he is befriended by Hans, an enigmatic Dutchman who draws Kristian into an equally enigmatic circle. One of the circle members is Vivian, a theater director working on a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Vivian and Kristian become romantically involved. Visited by inspiration, Kristian steals a cat from a veterinary clinic and boils it so he can take photos of the skeleton. The photos are instantly noticed at the photography school. But just as things begin to look up for Kristian, a harrowing incident threatens to derail his life. On his way to Vivian’s place one night, Kristian accidentally kills a homeless man. The incident is caught on camera, and Kristian is arrested by the police. Inexplicably, and not without Hans’s influence, he is exonerated. By the time the reader catches up with him in the third, penultimate part of the novel, Kristian has become a celebrated photographer. A husband and a father to a little boy, he is at the peak of his success – until a careless remark during a well-publicized media event causes his life to unravel. When the devil shows up to collect the goods, he gets a lot more than just Kristian’s soul.
“There is no reason to be afraid of death – when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” If the first sentence of a novel is a platitude, you are in trouble. Attributing the platitude to Epicurus, as the novel’s first-person narrator does in the next sentence, does not lift the first one out of bumper-sticker territory. We quickly find out that the book is a 500-page-long suicide note the narrator doesn’t really care to write (“I don’t want to write about what happened to me”). For some reason, he does it anyway, and the reader must suffer alongside. As a writer, Knausgaard is at his best when he writes about the banal and the pedestrian; in deeper waters, he struggles to stay afloat. My Struggle, by the way, is not immune to this. In its last volume, for example, he writes, “How might we otherwise explain the darkness in Jesus’s soul that eventually drove him to Jerusalem, there to close door upon door until only the last and simplest remained? His final days can be interpreted as a way of eliminating all choices, so that responsibility for what was to happen, his slow death on the cross, would not be his, since he would be directed there, so to speak, by the will of others.” This sounds deep until you pause to reflect on what it really means and realize it means very little; this is the sort of secondhand, low-cost nugget of wisdom that writers put into circulation to make their readers feel like they are reading something profound when in fact they are not. In My Struggle, Knausgaard gets away with it – the novelty of the format, the unabashed frankness, and the unvarnished portrayal of the prosaic side of the writing life make parts of My Struggle compelling, alleviating its sprawling tedium. The School of Night is a traditional novel, and so different rules apply.
It wouldn’t be fair to expect Knausgaard to say something original. To paraphrase one comedian, everything there is to write has already been written, just not by everyone. I can put up with a certain degree of pseudo-profundity if the rest of the stuff is engaging enough. Unfortunately, it isn’t. The shifts between various points of Kristian’s life are handled abruptly. The narrator spends some fifty pages recounting a visit to his family in Norway, during which little of significance happens, but the story leaps straight from Kristian’s release from the police station to his stardom (an intervening low-grade, low-stakes fling with a neighbor doesn’t count). Some scenes are masterfully rendered, the one involving the boiled dead cat a case in point. But this is drowned out by ruminations on 1980s music, insipid dialogues, and a writing style that feels more than a little voulu, even once allowances are made for things inevitably lost in translation. Lest the reader forget this is a story about a Faustian bargain, there are constant and not especially subtle references to Marlowe and his famous play. The several descriptions of the narrator’s sexual congress made me think that in this republic of letters, I would ban all sex scenes if I were its president. The ending is strong but overwrought, and it is a patient reader who makes it all the way to the end.
The biggest problem is Kristian himself. Knausgaard takes a gamble with his narrator. Kristian is someone who has never met a feature that cared to redeem him. Even his own father doesn’t want him around. Kristian is so intensely unlikeable that his creator, who has made enemies with his disregard for other people’s privacy, felt obligated to clarify in a one-page addendum at the end of the novel that his character “has no basis in reality.” Personally, I don’t expect characters in novels to be paragons of virtue and probity – I won’t be having them over for dinner. But they have to be interesting. Kristian is undone not by a lack of humanness that one finds in, say, Thomas Bernhard’s misanthropic narrators; he is undone by an utter lack of complexity. Kristian is worse than a jerk; he is a completely uninteresting jerk. Perhaps the point here is that evil is banal – but Hannah Arendt already wrote a book by that name. Superficial and callous, Kristian is an unreliable narrator. I allow that someone like him might repent, but I am not convinced that the sensitivity required to describe his own fall can be so easily acquired. Worse than unreliable, Kristian is unbelievable. For all his putative ambition, he is not consumed by the kind of desire that makes a pact with the devil plausible – and if he did, the devil would not be interested anyway, for to sell a soul, you must actually have one. Unlike Marlowe’s Faustus, Kristian has nothing to offer. Elsewhere, his motives ring false. It is hard to understand why a young man so selfish and self-centered would share cigarettes and a lighter with a homeless man, and it is also strange that a man who has repudiated his family and repeatedly condemned all filial bonds suddenly shows touching care for his own son.
And has the devil ever been depicted less vividly? While he need not be shown as a sinister creature with horns shoving contracts into people’s hands, Knausgaard could have done a lot better than Hans. Knausgaard’s devil is a regular bloke content to lurk in the shadows while Kristian charts his own downfall. But he is flat and entirely lacking in any color. So is his mysterious circle. Reading the novel, I couldn’t help but think of Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Bulgakov’s unappealing flirtations with Lucifer notwithstanding, Woland is a remarkable character, and his retinue is lush and memorable. Hans and his circle are anything but. They could as well be some parents Knausgaard meets in a Stockholm playground in My Struggle, smuggled into The School of Night as contraband. The devil might not be walking around introducing himself as the devil, but cheap metaphysics is poor metaphysics. Like Woland’s, Hans’s retinue also has four members (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?): Vivian; an Egyptian-looking man in a suit who keeps on bumping into Kristian all over London; a pretty girl named Danella; and a fourth person of whom I have no recollection. Unlike Woland’s entourage, they achieve perfect gender parity; in every other respect, they are completely forgettable. Knausgaard might as well be writing about changing children’s diapers. But the topic of evil is not one to be trifled with. Bulgakov took it seriously and, in a way, paid with his life; Knausgaard did not and paid with his book.
Knausgaard is very skilled at creating a sense of disquiet, a skill he employs effectively in My Struggle, not least because the sense of disquiet is never validated – disasters are foreshadowed but always take place elsewhere. In The School of Night, disasters are part of the plot, but they only serve to make the story overwrought. Knausgaard’s novel reminded me of a scathing review by one Hungarian-born writer that I once read. Wondering why bad books such as the one he is reviewing are getting published, the reviewer surmises the answer is in the power of pretentiousness. There are millions of people out there, the reviewer says, who believe that to hear about something is the same as to know it. The presence of some big names is enough to make them feel cultured, and the feeling is so empowering that they will happily forgive the book any and all of its flaws. It is a snobbish and rather harsh conclusion, and perhaps an unfair one in the context of The School of Night. But I do wonder if Knausgaard would have been able to publish this novel if he weren’t Knausgaard. Great books always leave the reader with something; this one, only with the comforting knowledge that there are better novels out there.