“The last time I was in New York,” Karl Ove ­Knausgaard wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine, in his account of traveling through the ­United States, “a well-known American writer invited me for lunch. . . . I tried desperately to think of something to say. We had to have something in common, we were about the same age, did the same thing for a living, wrote novels, though his were of considerably higher quality than mine. But no, I couldn’t come up with a single topic of ­conversation. . . . When we got back to Sweden, I received an email from him. He apologized for having ­invited me to lunch, he had realized he never should have done it and asked me not to reply to his email. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. . . . Then I ­realized he must have taken my silence personally. He must have thought I didn’t find it worth my time talking to him.”

Knausgaard doesn’t reveal the identity of the American writer he had lunch with. But I will: It was me. I may be the first reviewer of Knausgaard’s autobiographical works who has appeared in one of them. Therefore, I’m in a perfect position to judge how he uses the stuff of his life to fashion his stories. Ever since Knausgaard turned me into a minor character, I have an inside track on what he’s doing.

“My Struggle” shows its author beset by a host of troubles. Knausgaard contends with his tyrannical, alcoholic father; his sexual longings; the emasculating requirements of modern fatherhood; the boredom and rage that accompany even a loving marriage; the certainty of death; and, always and everywhere, his own painful self-consciousness. But the novel, over its six volumes and more than 3,500 pages, is also a literary struggle to achieve Knausgaard’s dream of someday writing “something exceptional.” This is hard to do right now because the world is awash in stories. “It was a crisis,” Knausgaard writes near the end of Book 2, “I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least ­because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same.” In reaction, Knausgaard set out to alter that distance from reality. He did this by viewing his life in extreme close-up and by treating everything that happens to him or passes through his mind with equal importance. The project might be compared, in painting, to photorealism, with its emphasis on hyper-clarity and detail; or, proceeding in the opposite direction, to Impressionism. In both cases it’s the shift in perception that makes the difference, simple enough in execution but groundbreaking in results.

Those of us who have fallen under Knausgaard’s spell and have signed on for the project are now rewarded with Book 4, the fleetest, funniest and, in keeping with its adolescent protagonist, most sophomoric of the volumes translated into English thus far. It tells the story of the year Knausgaard spent teaching school in northern Norway. On Page 117, the book moves backward in time to describe Knausgaard’s last years in high school, his love of drinking, his parents’ divorce and his romantic infatuations, before returning to the small town of Hafjord, on Page 325, to pick up the story. There are no chapter breaks to mark these time shifts, in keeping with the novel’s replication of the flow of memory. There is, however, a plot. Book 4 is a quest novel. “At that time, I was 16 that summer, there were only three things I wanted. The first was a girlfriend. The second was to sleep with a girl. The third was to get drunk. . . . No, when I actually came down to it, there was only one. I wanted to sleep with a girl. That was the only thing I wanted.”