There’s a special kind of despair, Thomas Pynchon observed in “The Crying of Lot 49,” that can arrive “when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.”

This is not a problem that Karl Ove Knausgaard has in the fourth installment of his quasi-autobiographical “My Struggle” series. Karl Ove is 18 in this novel, and has moved to rural northern Norway to teach elementary school and commence his life as a fiction writer. His despair derives from the fact that nearly every female has sexual relevance to him, yet he remains, painfully, a virgin.

“Everywhere you turned there were breasts under blouses, thighs and hips under trousers, beautiful smiling faces, hair blowing in the wind,” he cries. He poses, as if to the gods, the question that has animated so much (male) post-Homeric literature: “How do you go from standing in front of a girl in broad daylight, with all her clothes on, to sleeping with her in the darkness a few hours later?”

He figures this out, yet he doesn’t. His sexual experiences — with young women with names like Hanne and Beate and Vilde and Line — tend to be so abysmal that you begin to feel for his partners. You can imagine one of them commenting, as Sylvia Plath’s heroine does in “The Bell Jar” when she sees an adult penis for the first time, “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”