My Struggle, vol. 6: Marit MacArthur, November 13

Sacramento, California, indoors, hiding from hellish air quality due to the Camp Fire, dealing with my children's first case of head lice

"Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing." - John Ashbery

Dear interlocutors,

I was not at ASAP in New Orleans. Dan is the only fellow KOK blogger I've met, at a Cultural Analytics symposium at Notre Dame in 2017. Ben Lee told me years ago about plans to start ASAP, and I thought—what a great idea! Still haven't gotten around to attending. Some Post45 affiliates have urged me to join Post45, saying they need more poetry scholars. Well, here I am—debuting about an autobiographical-fictional tome of prose in translation.

As a poetry scholar, I was deeply bored by KOK's labored enactment in Book 6 of his incompetence at reading poetry through the example of Paul Celan's "The Straitening." A poem I understand, on a first read, as well as I think it is meant to be understood. Other than that, and the tragic fact that KOK's bipolar then-wife had a mental breakdown over My Struggle, I have no other complaints about Book 6.

I confess I'm only on page 684. Excuses: I have two daughters, ages 6 and 8, a job or two, a sometimes-delightfully-sensitive-and-supportive-and-sometimes-too-needy-and-maddeningly-neurotic-partner (sound familiar?), a NEH grant to co-direct, a yoga addiction to manage, etc. Book 6 may not turn out to be my favorite. But if we think KOK's project is an Important Work of Literature, not reality television in prose, this particular book matters a lot. Even as it continues and concludes the narrative, it also enacts a meta-analysis, not to say a justification, of the entirety of My Struggle, and the personal consequences of the book for KOK and his family.

In South Bend, at some pub on the river that served the sort of trendy Southern comfort food I like as much as I like having a brick in my belly, Dan and I briefly enthused about Knausgaard. He told me about this series, and mentioned that Diana had written about her choice to stop reading. This irritated me. I offered to offer an alternative perspective sometime. Here it is.

I am mildly concerned that this will sound like a defense of KOK. It is not. My Struggle needs no defense in the literary sense, as it needs no more readers. And this is not, despite the prevailing sensibility of this series, a trial.

All of the letters here, some in their entirety and some in passages, either put KOK on trial or defend their author for reading him, or both. As if enjoying My Struggle is a guilty, politically suspect pleasure.

This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, KOK displays his narrator's feelings—and his thoughts about them, which for him are secondary, and this emphasis on feeling is not mere self-indulgence but part of a unified aesthetic theory—in constant flux, and in flagrant disregard of whether they align with liberal-progressive political dogma. Though sometimes, they certainly do. We may, at times, like this narrator, at others, dislike him. But he is not trying to make us like him. That's not his project, any more than it is Otessa Moshfegh's or Thomas Bernhard's. The extraordinary degree of My Struggle's success seems genuinely to have taken KOK by surprise.

Second, literary criticism now, infected by, among other things, the political hell we are living through—in which real people are suffering from life-threatening racism, sexism, nationalism, LGBTQ-phobia, anti-immigrant ire, the total rejection of asylum-seeking, and so on—can feel too often like an ideological trial.

In such a trial, the critic's primary purpose to is to score political points, to prove that they, the critic, is more-feminist-than-thou, less-racist-than-thou, more-high-minded-than-thou, etc. The critic often scores these points by showing that the author—often not even the work, but the author, as, for instance, when Rachel discusses brief comments made by DFW and KOK in interviews as the basis for judging whether they are misogynist, whether they wrote long books to impose their phalluses on us, and whether they seem to be sufficiently self-critically aware of their political failings as straight white men for their works to be worth reading—has failed to adhere to the critic's preferred dogma, e.g., that men should not openly admit that their "first thought" on seeing a woman is "what it would be like to have sex with her."I openly admit—which is easier for a woman than a man to do—that I, at some point, evaluate the sexual attractiveness of every adult I meet in person; I'm not better than that. I also tend toward logorrhea, despite lacking a phallus.

Though I share Rachel's powerless anger about the Kavanaugh hearings and the catastrophe of his confirmation after the heartrending testimony of Dr. Ford, it bothered me that she ripped a phrase from the novel out of context ("It feels like I've gone to hell") to make KOK sound as if he agrees with Kavanaugh that he should not have had to go through the ordeal of the nomination hearings. That phrase describes KOK's response to his uncle's vitriolic, arguably classist and misogynist attacks on him, his mother, and her whole "peasant" side of the family, which we might easily ascribe to said uncle's refusal to acknowledge his brother's cruelty or self-destructive alcoholism, even to himself, much less to the world.

Not only are the experiences and degrees of presumed guilt incomparable here, between Kavanaugh and KOK—we're not talking about what KOK's book has done to Linda yet, just Uncle Gunnar—but KOK invokes hell, I think, and on this point Rachel seems to agree, to emphasize that he feels he did do something wrong, that he's guilty as sin for publishing his views of his father. Though he's not a believer, KOK had a deeply Christian education. He had his children christened. He wrote A Time for Everything. Norway's most common obscenities, in contrast to ours, often send one's antagonist to the devil. (More digressively, I might add, the father of a contemporary Norwegian friend of mine drank himself to death while living with his mother, and with alcoholism in my own family background, I did not find KOK's account of such a demise to be over the top.)

Nor is My Struggle an occasion for me, as it was for Rachel, to take a passage about parenting out of context to support the thesis that KOK intends his novel to dominate us. She implies that he feels a sadistic affinity with another father's "uncompromisingly Victorian parenting methods" that he uses to "break [his child's] will," because KOK says something noncommittal to the father about those methods. He was being polite. In fact, he disagrees with them, and is initially "furious," and Linda "enraged," to learn that that father imposed those methods on KOK's eldest daughter by making her sit at the table until she ate her dinner at "her first ever sleepover" at his house. KOK then decides that "it wasn't that bad, besides it was probably good for her to see that different people had different rules" (28-29). This is typical KOK; he shows himself thinking and feeling one thing and saying another to avoid conflict, then he shows how his feeling and thinking change. And he certainly doesn't conclude that he should adopt uncompromising Victorian parenting methods. He can't manage his children. Who can?

And this is one of many experiences I share with KOK's narrator: the awkwardness of getting to know one's children's peers' parents, who are often not, alas, friend material. "This was how it was having children, you found yourself thrown together with complete strangers, people who were sometimes impossible to understand."

Reading the other letters, a hazy, familiar feeling came over me. It happens at conferences, when I read book reviews, really anywhere literature is discussed now. I am with you, I think, politically. But: what about the book and what it did to and for you? Not the politics you glean from interrogating a few cherry-picked passages? What about the experience that, I thought, motivated us to become literary scholars, rather than sociologists or political commentators—that is, defamiliarization through aesthetic use of language?

***

Here's what Book 6 does for and to me, and what it seems to make possible. If you will, consider these quotations:

"[A]rguments have got to be rational, and this is about the opposite, the irrational, all the feelings we have" (185)

"My question is why we conceal the things we do. Where is the shame in human decline? The complete human catastrophe? To live the complete human catastrophe is terrible indeed, but to write about it?" (186)

"One must fasten one's gaze" (381)The first two come from the imaginary trial KOK stages in Book 6, early on in his encounter with his uncle's rage against Min Kamp. The narrator attempts to justify his project to an imaginary lawyer who is cross-examining him. The lawyer is not impressed. They talk past each other. What the lawyer wants is factual accuracy—treating Uncle Gunnar's memory as true—not KOK's literary theorizing. But the imaginary lawyer is not KOK's intended audience. We, his readers, are.

KOK's respect for feeling, or more precisely his artistic imperative to attend to feeling, unifies Book 6—even the long sections that seem to be "about" Hitler, and about works of art and literature that he admires—and it goes some distance toward unifying the whole project.

Though sometimes I, like Omari, have felt that KOK is "a grown man desperate at the end of a 3600-page tome to show he has read some stuff," we might acknowledge that he has, in fact, read a lot of stuff. Moreover, there is a common thread to what he likes, which has driven this remarkable project that has gained so many readers.

KOK likes art and literature that bring us closer to our own existence, to the phenomenal world, to history and memory, through defamiliarization achieved by intense attention to the real from one's particular perspective. He likes this not as an approach to Objective Reality or Truth, but as a morally and aesthetically necessary escape from the appallingly absent-minded "la vie est allieurs/life is elsewhere" manner in which we pass most of our time until death, a manner that omnipresent digital media has only intensified and further enabled. We all know that "[w]e live our lives surrounded by commercial goods, and spend great swathes of our waking hours in front of screens," but we are not particularly prepared to resist them or grapple with the consequences (634-5). KOK's artistic antidote to this comfortable, alienating way of life is sustained attention. "[T]he job of the novelist," he writes "can no longer be to write more fictions. That was the feeling I had: the world was vanishing because it was always somewhere else, and my life was vanishing because it too was always somewhere else." (413)

Here he sets out his aesthetic philosophy: "[W]hat the novel can do, and which is perhaps its most important property, is to penetrate our veils of habit and familiarity simply by describing things in a slightly different way, for example by being insistent with respect to some particular state of affairs, let's say describing a child's pacifier over a whole page, in that its pacifying .... would thereby be modified, or by juxtaposing things not normally juxtaposed, since it was not reality that had vanished, but my attention toward it. I could not relinquish my grip on it, this was my intuition, or my explanation for the fundamental lack of meaning I felt in my life, and it may well have been just another explanation, another theory, in itself abstract, but it did not feel that way, and if there's something I've learned to trust over the course of the forty-two years I have lived, it is my feelings." (414)

Buying coffee and treats for his family using a debit card, KOK writes, "The little card reader came abruptly to life and ejected a slow ribbon of paper from its innards" (88). That's the exploding sausage, for me. The soulless, lifelike machines in our lives abruptly, imperiously command our attention, with pings and sudden print-outs, and we obey.

Come on, Frederic Jameson. All you can be bothered to grasp from KOK's attention to daily life is "itemization"? Jameson writes, in his recent review in The London Review of Books, "We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to 'estrange' our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them, to list the items that come by." Really?

Though Jameson alleges description and estrangement to be impossible or beside the point for a postmodern writer, KOK has learned to "fasten [his] gaze." This is probably the most important phrase in the entire six volumes. It came from the priest who spoke at his father's funeral. "He could have said the little things are important; but he didn't. He could have said that loving thy neighbor is most important of all; but he didn't. Nor did he say what that gaze must be fastened upon. All he said was that it must be fastened." (381)It is through sustained attention to feeling—to sensory impressions, to memories, to irrational feelings and thoughts as they emerge and shift, including shameless scrutiny of ourselves, our relationships and received ideas, to daily existence as it unfolds—that necessary art today can be created. That is at least one reason that My Struggle is so long. The moments of insight and sublimity would feel—wrong? different? disingenuous?—packed into shorter volumes. This sustained attention has worked for KOK and his many readers. It evokes, among other things, "the starry luster of growing up" through scrutiny of his own youth and his children's, youth being a time when everything feels rich with meaning because we haven't yet become inured to feeling.

***

KOK achieved all this during a period in which he fathered and, with the help of his wife and daycare, cared for four children and perhaps managed to be a halfway decent husband, until his book destroyed his marriage. Art and life don't go together very well. David Stretfield, in "Being a Bad Friend to David Foster Wallace" in the Times Literary Supplement, writes that "Like many male artists, he [DFW] wanted freedom to work as long and as obsessively as he could, and then a woman to tend and love him when he took a break." This might actually be what any artist wants, not only cisgender males. A consequence of the wonders of increased gender equality is that we are increasingly attracted to our equals, who often aren't content to play the lesser helpmate. Taking turns requires perfect timing. So many successful artists have been childless, or neglected the children they had, not to mention their lovers or spouses. KOK does not present himself as a good father, in fact he constantly criticizes himself as a father, though he certainly comes across as a much more involved father than his best friend Geir. as a foil because he entertains more traditional notions of masculinity, and though KOK often doesn't contradict him in dialogue, it's hard not to think Geir would feel contradicted in reading the book. I am continually amazed that anyone could write such a book while being a parent of young children at all, much less an involved parent to four children. KOK's energy and ambition are astonishing.

In part, I enjoy KOK's friendship with Geir because I appreciate the importance of friendship amid parenthood. And their friendship reflects my own ambivalence about creativity and criticism. As Geir tells him, "'you're writing a novel, whereas I'm writing nonfiction. I've been destroyed by academia. It makes me check and double-check everything I do.... You're without bonds entirely.'" (203) Friendship can feel like an amazing escape from daily life, even when it's banal, as when Geir and KOK hang out while letting their children watch TV. Omari, don't judge parents too hastily! My kids don't have any devices of their own. I'm proud and sad that they already prefer the company of books to me at breakfast, and would at dinner, too, if I let them. The only thing they know how to do on my iPhone, which they get access to for about 20 minutes each week, is check the weather, look at photos and ask Siri silly questions. They only get cartoons on weekends. But sometimes I'd do anything to have a sustained conversation with a friend. Here, Geir offers to distract KOK from his worries about Uncle Gunnar's reaction to his novel.

"Do you want something else to think about?" he said.

"That wouldn't be so bad," I replied.

"'I was in town the other day and bought a pair of clogs.'"

"I don't think this is going to be enough to lift me up into the light," I said.

It's not enough to lift him up into the light, but the distraction, in which Geir details his plan to torment his noise-intolerant downstairs neighbor, is a relief.

Omari, if you re-read pages, say, 83-8 and 254 of Book 6, are you still utterly convinced that KOK is a racist xenophobe? Many languages with guttural sounds—guttural as a linguistic descriptor, not an insult—might sound like "coughing and spitting" to one who doesn't speak them. German does, to me, and Russian used to, until I learned some Polish. KOK is, after all, something of an immigrant—a Norwegian living in Sweden, which to him feels like a very culturally distinct country, where people seem to notice when he's speaking his native language. He is a man of Aryan coloring who from kindergarten has chosen as erotic objects dark-haired, dark-eyed females. If a straight white person values difference, must this be labeled racist exoticism? If he despairs of the erasure of immigrants' cultural differences through forced assimilation to Western culture, must this be labeled xenophobia? Page 254 of Book 6 offers support for Walter Benn Michaels' thesis in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Whether KOK knows that book or not, it applies to Sweden as much as the U.S. Pages 83-84 are inspired by KOK's hanging out with his children at a park not visited exclusively by people who look like them. I find taking my children to parks to be one of the most boring activities ever, except that at least it gets us outside. I tend to choose ones where they will not see only children who look like them, while I stand there watching them exert themselves, scheming about when I'll get to go to a yoga class. I'd like to talk to a parent at a park who has KOK's thoughts while watching his kids.Through his writing, KOK makes his narrator feel like a companion.  I don't mind the length of My Struggle because it is not, like most things DFW writes, relentlessly brilliant sentence by sentence. Instead, it is like hanging out with someone with an interesting mind who is sometimes telling me about their boring day in tedious or compelling detail, sometimes recommending a book that sounds worth reading, sometimes delighting me by articulating some dimly perceived affinity or insight about contemporary life or parenting or art or literature or politics that I perhaps began to intuit recently and didn't bother to completely realize or explain to myself because I can't pay attention to anything for more than thirty seconds most of the time except when I'm teaching or writing.

As someone who veers between creative and critical writing, between the obligations of parenthood and family life and my own intellectual and artistic ambitions, I find KOK's casualness that somehow rises to sublimity inspiring. Parenthood is isolating—it isolates one from one's friends, from one's partner too, because there is so little time to just hang out and have uninterrupted adult conversation—and so hanging out with KOK's narrator by reading My Struggle, through some of the early years of my daughters' childhood, has felt, well, companionable. Is it logorrhea, or whatever the equivalent would be for reading, to enjoy it?

As W.G. Sebald writes, channeling Michael Hamburger in The Rings of Saturn: "For days and weeks one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life."

Maybe it's antisocial, maybe it's excessive to write as much as KOK does, or to read it at such length, but it makes me feel better—less alone in our/my inevitable, hateful, wonderful solitude.

KOK writes, on a day off from childcare, "I went as fast as I could, feeling guilty about being away from the family, or rather about leaving Linda to deal with the children on her own. I couldn't help it. I strode on, past the Hansa arcade... The streets were busy... All sat soaking up this unexpected summer's day. I felt calm and excitement at the same time; it felt good, but underneath was anxiety." (23-24) That's more or less the way I feel every time I leave my family for a conference, though perhaps even worse, because a mother's place is with her children.

Or this. Hasn't any parent with intellectual or creative ambitions felt this way when one's children were small, no matter how wonderful said children are? "I felt myself to be at the very limit of what I could endure, so removed from the life I wanted to live that I could hardly think about anything else" (332).

KOK is so good when writing about children, not sentimentalizing or patronizing them or using them for comic relief, but paying attention to the intensity of their feelings, which can be funny and maddening to adults—so irrational!—but deadly serious and utterly important to them. John, on the way home from the nursery one day, doesn't want to go down a particular side of the street. "He twisted around in the stroller and glared at me full of rage and despair." KOK mollifies him with the promise of ice cream. But it doesn't erase the rage and despair.

***

Maybe KOK's artistic philosophy is an application of Buddhist mindfulness as artistic practice—with the huge caveat that Buddhism emphasizes compassion as much as honesty, and KOK has certainly failed in terms of compassion. Why couldn't KOK write his novel, change the names of the characters, and publish under a pseudonym? Was it necessary to appear photographed in so many magazines wearing a black leather jacket? I'm not convinced by his explanation of why he felt he had to use people's real names. He's not the first author to hurt his family in the service of his art, but making his extremely vulnerable wife a major subject of his art—not just her mental illness but her comparatively failed artistic ambition and inadequacy as a breadwinner and housekeeper—is a new ethical low. (Talk about dirty laundry!) Part of me is inclined to invoke what Elizabeth Bishop said of Robert Lowell's use of his wife's pained letters in his poetry, and I haven't even read about Linda's breakdown yet: "One can use one's life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? If you were given permission—if you hadn't changed them... etc. But art just isn't worth that much."Men suffer from testosterone poisoning, and Robert Lowell had a very bad case of bipolar disorder. That's not to say I think KOK writes with his cock—I'm sorry, but you knew that pun was coming. I only noticed his initials spell that when I bought the gazillionth book he had signed with them, appreciating the pun himself, no doubt.Elena Ferrante, if The Neapolitan Novels are remotely autobiographical, neatly avoided seriously hurting the real people on whom she might have based some characters by not using their names and, for the time being, prevented the sort of research that might track them down by using a pseudonym herself, even though the relentless have figured out who she probably is. I despise deterministic prediction or explanation of behavior according to identity category—among the 7+ billion people in the world, variety reigns—but a dose of estrogen mightn't hurt KOK's ethical sense any.

Why should I pass judgment against KOK for his treatment of his wife, but not for the moments when he betrays liberal-progressive political dogma? I shouldn't, and I don't—no one can judge a marriage from the outside, and we are certainly outside, no matter the illusion of intimacy KOK creates—but there is a difference between what we might call, without belittling the term, microaggressions against dogma in the service of sustained attention and defamiliarization, and tormenting one's intimates, which is what the content of this book appears to have done to Linda.

Perhaps if you're that doggedly ambitious about pursuing an autobiographical literary project, try to avoid falling in love, marrying, and procreating with a mentally unstable woman with artistic ambitions of her own. And don't be raised by a solipsistic, sadistic father.

An awful childhood, however, does not doom us to be horrible parents or horrible people. KOK's model of parenting is his mother, of course. Somewhere in an earlier volume, he mentions how few intense childhood memories he has of his mother, to whom he is quite close, largely because she was just around, taking care of him, not terrifying him with temper or shamelessly neglecting him, like his father. KOK aspired to be that sort of presence in his children's lives that his mother was in his: reliable, sane, a source of half-forgotten security in the background. KOK writes, "Hitler was not the only person in the Hapsburg Empire with an authoritarian father and a loving mother, with siblings who perished and dreams of a becoming a metropolitan artist. No, the age was full of them." (602)

This is funny. To me, anyway. It also points to the virtues of the Hitler section. Like Katherine, "I would never read a sentence of Mein Kampf"—and now we don't have to, because KOK has held his nose and done it for us, along with reading other contextualizing Hitleriana. But I also think that ours is a problematic position because, by distancing and otherising evil, as KOK implies we generally do, by making Hitler inevitably evil from childhood, we hold ourselves innocent of resembling him. But we must not be, given how many people enthusiastically went along with Hitler—some of whom had tough childhoods and metropolitan artistic aspirations, no doubt—and how many today enthusiastically go in for anti-immigrant rhetoric delivered by ranting lunatics.

I, for one, had never read about the extreme degree of poverty that existed in Vienna in the early twentieth century. The indifference to loss of human life it might engender is not KOK's point in situating Hitler's young manhood there. What's disturbing about reading about Hitler and his time is 1) how much he was a product of it, rather than an aberration from it, and 2) how much we still tolerate extreme inequalities fueled by virulent us-vs.-them politics. As Katherine writes so aptly of the Hitler section, "I can't say I found it boring. The most famous inhumane person in history was, after all, a human being. For Karl Ove, this is not a koan that humanizes Hitler; it's a koan that Hitlerizes the human."

KOK seems initially to have made himself read Mein Kampf as penance for the bad joke of naming his novel after it, at Geir's suggestion. Again, I remember his love of Thomas Bernhard. For someone with that literary taste, as for me, the sight of a book several feet thick called My Struggle cannot fail to amuse. It echoes Bernhard's slimmer autobiographical work, Gathering Evidence—as if for a trial.

To reclaim the I for the non-heroic, to suggest that an ordinary aspiring writer has the right to devote attention to their struggle at least as much as Hitler did, and to title it in a self-parodying manner as if it is an important struggle, on par with the world-historical significance of Hitler's incarnation of evil, does not seem to me presumptuous but playful. It seems presumptuous to us now, I think, in part because My Struggle proved to be so wildly popular that it has been translated into more than thirty languages.This book was, let us remember, "an experiment in realism that [KOK thought] would reach only a very small number of interested readers and be hurled at a wall out of sheer boredom and frustration by anyone else who might venture into its pages." (414)

"Art is what cannot be done again, Borges reminds us" (677). My Struggle cannot be written again, and it shouldn't be. It will inspire uninspiring imitations, like all great art, because it makes anything seem possible for a moment. At the least, it shows one way forward for the serious literary novel, which Ferrante has also shown in her own way: sustained attention to and merciless scrutiny of ourselves, our relationships, our politics, our literature, and our children, without sentimentalizing any of it, without accepting the pieties or dogma or received ideas, without trying to make the reader like us or our characters. No one can predict where such a course will take us, but I predict that many readers will find the best of such work immensely refreshing, and heartening, because, when we can bother to pay attention at all, we are tired of lying to ourselves and others, and being lied to. "As a means for the preservation of the individual the intellect shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation...the constant fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that there is virtually nothing which defies the understanding so much as the fact that an honest and pure drive toward truth should ever have emerged in them." ("On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense") Nietzsche never gets old.

And we are kept so busy by our imperious devices and by capitalist economic realities that it has become incredibly hard to sustain attention to anything—whether that thing seems to matter or not according to received ideas—much less to challenge the orthodoxy of one's political tribe in a thoughtful way without risking condemnation. Trump's tweets are the least of it. Whatever else we might say about KOK, the man can pay attention to seemingly banal, everyday phenomena or interactions that we ignore or dismiss constantly, and by doing so, he often achieves what we can't help but recognize as significant insights. And who's to say you can't plunk long essays "about" Hitler, and about your favorite works of art and literature, in the midst of an autobiographical novel? Does this really feel so unfamiliar after postmodernism, if we think of it as including the method and the explanation of the method as part of the fiction? If KOK had carried on the same interruptive essayistic mode in the form of footnotes that threaten to take over the page, we might find it passé.

And yes, KOK must have been somewhat crazy to risk the relationships closest to him by writing My Struggle. Awaiting his brother's response to the novel (the brother at whose face he once threw a pint glass, remember, after he began dating a woman KOK adored and botched his own chance with), he writes:

"What was to be gained by telling things the way they were, representing my own feelings toward him? Compared to what I could lose? He could say fuck you, I want nothing more to do with you.

What would I do then? Remove it all? Or keep it and lose a brother?
I would keep it and lose a brother.

There was no doubt about it.
Why?

Was I mad?" (57)

Yes, perhaps. But as John Ashbery once asked in an interview, "it seems odd to me and something I wonder about a great deal: why is it that the average Joe when writing poetry doesn't really illuminate the experience of a number of readers the way a very odd, exceptional, damaged sensibility does?"

If you write off KOK, you're missing out. Now let's blog about Helen de Witt. Or Ottessa Moshfegh. Or Marilynne Robinson.

Marit

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back

The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction

My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6

My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9

My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17

My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24

My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1

My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12

My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16

My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18

My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25

My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1

My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4

My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12

My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25

My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1

My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2

My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15

My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27

My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3

My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28

My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9

My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10

My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15

My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23

My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Omari, October 31

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Jess Arndt, November 6

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Joshua Keating, November 12