His six-volume opus, “ My Struggle,” is a multi-thousand-page accounting of his childhood, family and sex life, among many other things. Knausgaard is probably the most internationally famous practitioner of what emerged about a decade ago as a viable market alternative to the conventional realist novel: autofiction. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new novel, “The Morning Star,” made me feel as though I were drifting through a nearby galaxy, randomly encountering and re-encountering certain celestial beings, before being released, with a disembodied whoosh, into metaphysical deep space. Instead of trying to determine the appropriate feel of novels, in order to deliver a value verdict - good or bad - I find it more useful to describe what I feel like when I read them. They no longer know how to feel about them - viable or not? asset or not? - and whether or not they should invest their approval. When novels abandon these rules, and thus stop feeling like novels, some readers no longer know how to confidently interact with them as consumers. The obligatory “world building.” The demand for “stakes,” as though readers were shareholders in a sympathy enterprise, expecting an emotional “payoff.”
Some of these conventions, as Matthew Salesses and Felicia Rose Chavez have noted about the biased language of writing workshops, reflect and perpetuate our deeply ingrained, self-interested, capitalist mores. I’m assuming “does not feel like a novel” refers to how more and more so-called novels don’t adhere to certain realist narrative conventions, while still operating within the bounds of realism. If I could articulate that feeling, where would it have come from? Could I trust it? And if, by broader consensus, nothing feels like a novel nowadays, is this cause to grieve or rejoice?
I found myself wondering what a novel, good or otherwise, might feel like to me. THE MORNING STAR by Karl Ove Knausgaard | Translated by Martin AitkenĪ reviewer for this newspaper, writing about Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel, “ No One Is Talking About This,” described the author, glowingly, as a “modern word witch,” before settling on this conclusion: “For all the local beauty and humor of ‘No One Is Talking About This,’ it does not feel like a good novel, exactly, because it does not feel like a novel at all.
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