While a student at Harvard, in the early two-thousands, Pete Buttigieg taught himself Norwegian in order to read more books by an author he liked. Not Spanish. Not for a class. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a Presidential candidate, stumbled across the English translation of a 1996 novel called “Naïve. Super,” by Erlend Loe. The book, a best-seller in Norway, follows a twentysomething man who drops out of college after experiencing an existential crisis. As my colleague Benjamin Wallace-Wells recounted in a recent Profile, Buttigieg was “entranced” by the novel and started learning Norwegian so that he could work through the rest of Loe’s œuvre, which had not been translated into English. Recently, Buttigieg included “Naïve. Super” on a list of his ten favorite books of all time.

To borrow an astrology metaphor from his own millennial cohort, Mayor Pete functions as the left’s rising sign: he is the fresh-faced humanist, how Democrats want to be seen. He has an uncannily Obama-like speaking cadence and a stylized naturalism—explaining his soft spot for “Ulysses,” by James Joyce, he described the famously difficult book as “a guy going about his day for one day.” Buttigieg’s polyglotism sets him apart from most of his fellow-Americans; when he addressed the destructive fire at Notre-Dame, he did it in perfect, extemporaneous French. Jay Caspian Kang used that moment, and the “Naïve. Super” factoid, to argue, in the New York Times Magazine, that Mayor Pete speaks to the liberal upper middle class’s “dilettantish longing” for signifiers of learning and substance. “With his air of decency and grab bag of gifted-and-talented party tricks,” Kang wrote, Buttigieg “doesn’t so much represent the will of the Democratic electorate but rather the aspirations of its educated elite.”

It’s true that liberals value smarts and possible that they are unduly enamored of Buttigieg’s accomplishments. But it’s not that Buttigieg’s brains and drive should be used against him; Kang’s objections are directed instead at our culture and at how even our core political values feel mediated by social media. Kang underlined Mayor Pete’s “internetty smarts”: “intelligence reduced down to a collection of references and images.” Buttigieg seems to embody a vision of the meritocrat as influencer, giving Clinton-era ideals a contemporary, self-expressive twist.

That said, the trademark Buttigieg traits of openness, intellectual curiosity, and bookish determination are made all the more alluring by the unthinkability of Donald Trump exhibiting any of the same qualities. Erlend Loe himself pointed this out to me when I asked him about Buttigieg learning Norwegian to read his book. “It shows a personal curiosity and initiative that the sitting President is very far from having,” Loe said over the phone. “It’s impressive—that he seems to think outside of himself and want to learn about the world. It’s very interesting for a Presidential candidate.”

“Naïve. Super,” which I read in an English translation, by Tor Ketil Solberg, tracks the disenchantment and reënchantment of its narrator, who wakes up one morning to find that “everything seemed meaningless . . . my own life, the lives of others, of animals and plants, the whole world. It no longer fitted together.” The narrator regresses, seeking solace in toys such as a red plastic ball and a BRIO hammer-and-peg set. He makes lists of things he has (“a good bike,” “a good friend,” “a bad friend”) and things he doesn’t have (“a girlfriend,” “enthusiasm”). He faxes his pal Kim, who is studying to become a meteorologist while stationed on a remote island; he reads the work of the quantum physicist Paul Davies and stresses about galactic vastness and the finality of time. The narrator’s childlike guilelessness, which moved many reviewers to compare him to Holden Caulfield, is a kind of Möbius strip of shallowness and depth, innocence and wisdom. The narrator wants people to be good, and for everything to “be all right in the end,” and “to live a simple life with many good moments and a lot of fun.” He speaks in a language that one critic, flipping the title, called “superbly naïve.” (“The world is full of balls,” he says. “People use them all the time. For fun, games and probably other things. It all comes down to choosing the right one.”)

“It’s a coming-of-age story,” Loe said. “It’s about being in your twenties and not knowing what your life will bring, and not being sure that you are in the right place. I’ve been travelling for years with this novel, and I have met a lot of reactions in a lot of different countries—in China, in Canada—and it seems to be quite a universal theme: growing up and finding your place. I would guess that this is something Buttigieg was interested in when he was much younger than he is now.” Loe’s brainy, mopey narrator compiles a lengthy list of “what I know a lot about,” including “Movies,” “Literature,” and “Aerodynamics.” His problem is “what I am supposed to use it for.” One imagines the question resonating with any college student who is glittering with potential, wondering how and why to put his talents to work.

Coming-of-age novels often only pretend to be about disillusionment. In fact, they are intensely romantic, although the romance is articulated as skeptically as possible—as an absence of romance, a yearning for romance. The protagonists of bildungsromans usually end up turning inward, directing their sense of awe at their own bullshit detectors. Loe’s narrator, for instance, is searching for something to impress him; he becomes impressed by his own capacity to perceive the world’s phoniness. Another way to say this might be that coming-of-age stories star young adults, who are by definition a bit solipsistic, their inquisitiveness layered with self-regard. Interestingly, this is also the space in which many Americans encounter Buttigieg: to Kang’s point, perhaps we admire his array of “whimsical surplus achievement” in and for itself, and maybe we admire it in order to admire ourselves.

The narrator of “Naïve. Super” eventually lands in New York City, where a jostle of new impressions (the Empire State Building!) helps him rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose. He observes that “Americans seem to live according to the simple theory that two is better than one, three is better than two, etc. For example, they believe two hundred dollars is better than one hundred. It’s a cute theory.” As Loe told me, “In Scandinavia, we tend to look at Americans like big children, being a bit brutal and not very sophisticated, and very childlike, both in relation to materialism and to religion, taking it without very much questioning. It is a very traditional society.” (It is also, according to his narrator, a gluttonous one: “Many of the people are also big. Fat. Their trainers are all squashed on one side and worn thin because they weigh so much.”) With the help of his Frisbee-wielding brother, the transplanted narrator arrives at a solution for his malaise: “cleansing the soul through fun and games.”

A book like Loe’s possesses a very specific, late-adolescent sort of appeal. It addresses itself to profound ideas—the nature of time and the universe, how one should live—but it does so in a way that is knowingly flat, offering a provisional fix for a restless intellect, a fantasy in which the hard questions have easy answers. One can easily imagine a promising twentysomething devouring “Naïve. Super” as he dreams of taking on the world, and then, decades later, remembering the book with wistful fondness. And perhaps Buttigieg shouldn’t set aside the book’s lessons quite yet; in order to succeed, Presidential campaigns must be in the business of offering easy answers to hard questions. We crave, from politicians, coming-of-age stories: narratives that split the difference between romance and realism, aspiration and relatability. Helpfully, the narrator of “Naïve. Super” is a bit of a politician himself. “He makes himself likeable,” Loe told me, “by using a soft voice, with humor, and by talking about big things in a small way.”