MEN IN MY SITUATION

A Norwegian writer finds himself struggling to get his life together after the double whammy of his parents' and brothers' deaths in a tragic ship fire and the end of his 15-year marriage a year later.

Arvid Jansen is a recurring character and something of an alter ego in Pettersen’s fiction. The author's parents and brother died in an actual ferry disaster in 1990; his novel In The Wake (2002) concentrates on Arvid’s relationship with his father and his guilt and grief surrounding the deaths. In the newer novel, the focus is largely on the aftermath of Arvid’s divorce from his wife, Turid, and his longing for his three young daughters, whom he now rarely sees for reasons that may be of his own making. Arvid is 43 in In The Wake, and the final section of the new novel finds him at the same age, but for most of the (in)action, which takes place over the course of one Sunday a year after Turid and the girls left, he's looking back at himself at 38. (The missing years between 38 and 43 might be another novel.) Turid calls him early that morning. Stranded and desperate, she asks for his help getting home because “I have no one else,” a statement he disbelieves. Whether his marriage’s failure was his fault remains unclear, but while dutifully helping Turid get home, and later picking up his daughters—left with a babysitter he doesn’t trust—Arvid stews over his life, reexperiencing nonchronological bits and pieces of aimlessness and missed connections. Though he's published three books and received a grant to write his big factory novel, he currently spends most of his time picking up women at bars or roaming the countryside alone in his beloved Mazda, psychologically adrift; American readers may have more trouble following the physical geography of Norway he covers exhaustively than the depressed, self-absorbed, but beautifully articulated meanderings of his mind.

A melancholy read despite a glimmer of hope toward the end.