"In No Hurry" by Rachel Layton

In No Hurry

Rachel Layton Men in My Situation by Per Petterson Graywolf, 2022.

Per Petterson is a novelist known for his landscapes of grief and portrayals of characters dissolving into despair. His latest, Men in My Situation, is the fifth of his books chronicling the life of Arvid Jansen, a character whose life story closely resembles Petterson’s own. This new release covers familiar territory in Arvid’s life— the fallout of his divorce, which itself came in the wake of the loss of his family in a tragic ferry fire. Here, as ever, Petterson’s depictions of his characters’ constant, seeping grief is voyeuristic and teeth-grinding to the point of pain.

Opening a year after Arvid’s wife has divorced him and taken their three daughters with her, and two years after the loss of his parents and brothers, we are spun into the narrative at a sharp and sudden moment of need from his ex-wife, Turid. Jansen’s seemingly impenetrable grief is sharply and suddenly rattled when he receives a phone call from Turid, who has found herself abandoned and lost on the outskirts of their Norwegian town.

The following three-hundred or so pages flow backward in time, unrelentingly so, winding in and out of pockets of calm but mainly an arctic-cold stream of emptiness punctuated by late nights in dirty bars, empty wanderings of Norwegian towns, and long drives across the tundra in Arvid’s Mazda.

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B O OK R E V I E W

Turid’s initial introduction of brokenness and need is undercut by her years of distance, frigidity, and, in sudden blazing moments, cruelty. “It was as if she wanted to give me away. As if she didn’t care who I was with, as if she didn’t care where, didn’t care when. As long as I was not with her.” Her transformation into “the colorful”—a term Arvid coins to describe Turid and her vibrant life away from him and his grief—is foreign and viewed with numbing passivity through the eyes of her husband who, whilst wallowing in the anesthetized heartbreak of losing his born family, allows himself to lose the family he’s created as well.

Men in my Situation drives the reader toward a slow drift from sanity as the narrative deepens and develops. Nothing happens to you as the reader, but everything is happening around you.

Arvid holds you hostage, almost willing you to do something to clamor your way out from under his own hopelessness, to spring into some kind of action. But Petterson steadfastly refuses to do anything but hold the reader’s gaze with both hands, saying: Look. Look at the emptiness, the nothingness. See with your own eyes how no one is going to keep you in this world, the world of the “colorful,” other than your own self.

As Arvid swims in and out of pockets of memory, we are taken along the scenic route of the type of man he really is.

Arvid remembers: “Do you want me to kiss you, I said, and the whites of her eyes vanished . . . Not for a moment did I think of Turid.” It happens again and again, long lamenting over the loss of his wife, followed by these sudden and punchy scenes of Arvid’s selfish desires and weaknesses brought on by crippling dependence and loneliness. And yet, you don’t ever hate him as much as you pity him.

Petterson is willing to give you all, telling you the bad impulses, the wrong motives as well as the right ones, painting a complete picture of a man attuned with his own sensitivities and

R AC H E L L AY T ON

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shortcomings, though unwilling to challenge or change them— making it easier for us to forgive ourselves of our own. At the end of this novel, the reader lands alongside Arvid in his everpresent in-betweenness. Not static, not content, but with a level of broken acceptance to, “take all the time you need. We’re in no hurry.”