When I finished, I felt there were fang marks in my neck I wanted a blood transfusion. I carried it under my arm like a football, giving the Heisman Trophy push-off to friends, family, basic hygiene, Netflix and the pets. At nearly 1,200 earnest pages, Book Six is a life-drainer, so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it. Knausgaard’s new novel, the sixth and final book in his diaristic “My Struggle” series, is a gift to his detractors, those who have found the books to be solipsistic and overwrought. Sensing this ancient dynamic, Tom Wolfe once replied to an attack by Norman Mailer by commenting, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.” Mailer casually responded: “It doesn’t mean you’re the top dog just because your ass is bleeding.” When one breaks from the pack while up in the mountains - witness Jonathan Franzen or the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard - a target surfaces on his jersey. The most elite of the world’s white, male, under-60 novelists sometimes seem to ride together as if in a peloton, as if they were competitors in the Tour de France, coasting in and out of each other’s slipstreams.
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