It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than I’ve read a book that long in a long, long time (maybe since Lonesome Dove). My Struggle and Knausgaard have received a ridiculous amount of publicity recently. Sometimes I have to admit, yeah, I was just sucked in by the hype, but then I usually quit reading if it’s no good. I put down The Goldfinch after about twenty pages.  I made it through The Signature of All Things, but wasn’t pleased with my investment of time.

Picking up My Struggle wasn’t easy. When I first read about it, I thought, this has to be duller than dirt. Then the cacophony grew. I read Knausgaard being compared to Proust. I vowed doubly to stay away. James Wood, exalted New Yorker book critic, weighed in effusively. I tripled my vow to remain divorced from reading it. Then a few people I know personally had great things to say. A week ago, I walked into a bookstore to support a fellow local author’s event, saw it in paperback (I thought it was only hardcover), looked up at one of the sales ladies (who knows me from a book group that meets there), and I asked, rhetorically and with a distorted grimace, “Is this any good?” She blurts out, “Oh my God, I Loved it!”

Which was interesting because earlier that day I was arguing with a few other women, who had read that a few other women had written, “this is glorified mommy blogging – if Knausgaard had been a woman…” and, well, you probably know where that conversation went. It went to the restaurant where we had dinner at afterwards because those two ladies were with me.

I bought it. A few pages in later that evening, I was hooked. But why? Why?

First, realize that My Struggle is an anomaly from the get-go. I purchased and read Book 1 in paperback. Book 3 just came out in hardback. It is a six-volume work, something close to 2700 pages, I read somewhere. Two times a trilogy. Harry Pottisfjord’s autobiography under contract. Facing that commitment, maybe you could argue that the publisher has no choice but to alp horn this guy from every mountaintop, force every other author in its stable to blurb it glowingly, and sew up all slotting fees on the store shelves for the next several years. If that’s the case, they can’t even agree on what it is. One reviewer calls it a “giant autobiographical novel cycle,” another calls it just a novel. Everyone talking and reading about it calls it a memoir. Is that the appeal? It defies conventional categorization? I doubt it. Is it that the softcover has a close-up photo of Knausgaard, looking all intense, like he’s Bjorn Borg and he just murdered you in tennis?

One-tenth of Norway has read My Struggle, reportedly (and in the publishing business, the verb “to read” apparently is a synonym for the verb “to buy”). That’s half a million, based on the 2012 Norwegian census. But, you know, Scandinavians are very homogeneous, so they all read the same thing, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.

The title grabs you. My struggle. Really? That’s about the least descriptive title I can recall for contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s mis-titled. There’s no “struggle” going on here, at least not in Book 1. He’s an author examining his life, albeit putting some of the more sordid details on display, but as far as I can tell, his is an ordinary life. His struggle is little different from mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, or ours. I examine my life, staring at me like fisheyes in a bowl, whenever I’ve had more than two drinks and I’m alone.

Oh, wait, eureka moment! He’s written a bullet-proof epic autobiographical memoir novel cycle, and the critics can’t dig any dirt up on him. He beat them to it! Politicians have to be thoroughly vetted before the campaign begins. This is an author who self-vets.

You might think, Knausgaard having grown up in Norway and living in Sweden, that life in Scandinavia is a more fascinating struggle than other regions. Perhaps what struck me more than anything is how the culture, the politics, the pop culture, the people, the daily routine, etc, in My Struggle are identical to what I am familiar with in America. Except they eat more fish. Is western civilization so homogenized, I wondered, that the events, the rock star idols of youth, the books, the movies, the aspirations, the successes and failures, charting this guy’s “struggle” feel no less like my own, and everyone else’s I ever knew? An earlier eureka moment had me thinking, well, Scandinavians , especially men, are known for their reticence, for internalizing their, well, personal struggles, more so certainly, than, say, Mediterranean men (my heritage). Knausgaard is honest about his personal feelings…but so what? Lots of authors are. That’s the point of writing about yourself, at least in the literary context. I read Laura Bush’s autobiography. She was pretty honest.

He handles difficult topics, taboo topics? Not really. The narrator is honest about masturbation. But he has nothing on Phillip Roth’s Portnoy. The narrator is honest about his older brother. So was Kevin in The Wonder Years.

So, what is it? First, I am a sucker for reading about painful relationships between a father and a son. Russell Banks’ Affliction immediately comes to mind. Knausgaard lets us in on the tension between a confused young boy and a distant father, with no need to embellish it. So distant, in fact, that it could be called today abuse by neglect. Second, what Knausgaard does so well is refrain from emotional outbursts, or any conclusions, no tidy bows around the wrapping paper. The struggle, I am guessing, is that he has no answers, provides none to the reader. Daily life is made up of confusing, contradictory emotions, and there is no sorting them out. They are what they are. Knausgaard is generous with them, but he does not exaggerate them, does not put his emotions on some pedestal as if they are more interesting, more exalted, more worthy, than mine or yours.

He deals with his dad. He pretty much hates him. But the narrative is about dealing with him, day in and day out, under normal circumstances and tragic ones and what he feels moment to moment. He has friends. He has girlfriends. He has a wife. He has children. He is a writer. He gets along with his brother. He loves his mother. He cries all the time. He’s the John Boehner of contemporary literature. The struggle he is imparting to us is the grind of daily life. He’s not suffering, near as I can tell, not starving, not poor, not crippled, not mentally incapacitated. His struggle is to elevate the ordinariness of existence. Sprinkled in are commentaries on politics, global affairs, art, and the other extremities of existence, but never outside the random or prompted thoughts you would expect of someone immersed in daily living.

Knausgaard has no discernible “message,” no axe to grind (although I did read his family is furious or something, so maybe this changes in subsequent volumes).

He is allowing us into a place somewhere beyond introspective psychoanalysis but short of his spiritual self, his soul, which would make it a spiritual journey, of which there are plenty on today’s bookshelves. He is examining his ordinary life and the only thing extraordinary is that he is chronicling it.

Damned if it isn’t a fascinating place.

I don’t know how much credit goes to the translator or to Knausgaard, but these pages just blow by. Even the dense, non-dialogue stuff that we often hop-scotch through (but never admit to), even these passages move swiftly. Not once did I get the feeling that Knausgaard’s ego is on display, even though, arguably, one of the most egotistical things you can set out to do – you think? – is write a six volume autobiography (but, hey, if a publisher takes it on, more power to ya). Nowhere did I find senseless displays of literary pyrotechnics. The window onto his ordinary life has been wiped clear with Windex. No distortions, no apologies, no histrionics.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye came to mind frequently as I read My Struggle, partly because the book opens with his childhood, but mostly because there is an honesty, an authenticity to the first person narration, that hooked me from the first line: “For the heart, life is simple: It beats for as long as it can.” (And what about that rule never to use colons in fiction?). There is nothing to analyze here, nothing to interpret, nothing that requires a literary oracle to divine what the author means. It’s like Knausgaard took a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

Maybe this passage does as good a job as any to clue you in about what you are in for:

“While previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully, a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock; life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with each passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on.”

And here’s a passage that puts Book 1 in context:

“My father is dead, and I am thinking about the money that will bring me.

So what?

I think what I think.

I can’t help thinking what I think, can I?”

Obviously, he can’t help writing it either. And I can’t help but read it.