This odd novel starts well but can’t maintain the pace necessary to construct a reliable central character. It’s got a Knausgaardian reliance on actual reportage from life but it’s not as sustained as that exemplar in any of its moments. Heti fails to keep the engine going for long enough so that a plausible first-person narrator can emerge in the fragments she assembles for the reader. Which is a shame because the fey tone you find at the beginning is full of potential. It’s just that it doesn’t last.
Knausgaard keeps up the patter as he relays the minutiae of existence as he goes about his business during the day. The even tone he uses in his novels is the thing that keeps you reading but even though Heti at one stage buys a cassette recorder in order to capture conversations for future use, she doesn’t manage to create the persistent type of form that the Norwegian writer achieves in his autobiographical novels.
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