`But I Hate Being Entertained'

In the last year or so I’ve been obligated to read a number of novels because I agreed to review them for newspapers. Most were awful in a peculiarly pretentious way, top-heavy with over-heated ideas but empty of character, life and interesting prose. Often, despite a hyperactive plot, nothing of consequence happens and the result is interminable, inert verbiage. I think, in ascending order of awfulness, of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker, Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero, and Denis Johnson’s The Tree of Smoke, the last nothing more than a tarted-up thriller and the dullest novel I’ve read since the last time I read a Denis Johnson novel. I’ve been despairing of contemporary fiction, wondering why trash garners awards, reading past masters and waiting for the next Cynthia Ozick or Marilynne Robinson title to appear.

Somewhere I learned of Out Stealing Horse, by Per Petterson, a Norwegian. The narrator is Trond Sander, a 67-year-old a widower who has moved from Oslo into a small house outside a village near the Swedish border. For a novel devoted to the ever-presentness of the past, in which little seems to happen, Out Stealing Horses generates its own quiet, compelling sense of momentum. Early in the novel, after Sonder realizes one of his neighbors is a childhood acquaintance, he comments on the unlikelihood of such a thing happening in real life rather than fiction:

“Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating. I have in fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlier too, by all means, and I have thought about what I’ve read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it’s worth, and I take complete responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up precisely here.”

Sentence for sentence (as translated by Anne Born), Petterson gives us much to admire. I hear echoes of Beckett, especially Malone Dies, in the halting eloquence of the voice. There’s self-reflexiveness, an awareness of fictional artifice, but it’s not irritatingly clever or self-congratulatory. One can accept an aging, thoughtful, literate man regretting that life does not quite measure up to the resolutions in Dickens. After such a lovely phrase, “a long ballad from a vanished world,” think of Little Dorritt. And consider how he rejects the notion of fate while slowly perceiving its dominion over his life. Ten pages after the passage quoted above, Sander sharpens his chain saw and muses:

“I don’t know where I learned to do this. Presumably I have seen it on film; a documentary about the great forests or a feature film with a forestry setting. You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas. Thin ideas and something they call humour, everything has to be a laugh now. But I hate being entertained, I don’t have any time for it.”

Much matter is compacted in five sentences. Sander, who owns a car, a chainsaw, a radio and a dog, has nothing but time on his hands. We understand his impatience with the “entertainment industry,” its dedication to trivia. Laughs, for its characters and the reader, are rare in Out Stealing Horses, which is closer in spirit to Wild Strawberries than Star Wars.

At his blog on Wednesday, Terry Teachout quoted the Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa: “I have no time for any music which does not stimulate pleasure in life, and, even more importantly, pride in life.”" Paradoxically, much unhappiness and duplicity are chronicled in Out Stealing Horses (an unfortunate title referring to boys “joy riding” on a neighbor’s horses), but the result is the pride we feel in the presence of any well-crafted creation. Petterson’s descriptions of “real work” – haying, cutting timber, building a fire, rowing a boat – inspire pleasure and admiration for the work described and the artist who renders it.

Out Stealing Horses is notable for tight authorial control. There’s no sloppiness or self-indulgence. Its architecture is ingeniously complex but on the surface it appears elegant and inconspicuous. In contrast, the novels cited above, by Powers, Ondaatje and Johnson, are arbitrary and impulsive in construction. Their forms and themes are divorced. Not coincidentally, one can imagine all three turned into films, but not Petterson’s novel. Its beauty and mysterious power are rooted in plain, luminous words.