One gray morning in Oslo, a class at Fagerborg High School is making its usual hash of Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” The atmosphere is a Monday mixture of lassitude, cockiness, and routine. Elias Rukla has been teaching this play, in this school, for twenty-five years. Dignified, resigned, he subsists on the medicine of his own cynicism: he tells himself that it is not his job to excite the kids, merely to lay the foundations of their cultural heritage. He thinks of himself as a cog in the Norwegian pedagogical machine, an “officially appointed educator.”

But as he reads a scene to the class Elias Rukla is snagged, perhaps for the first time in a quarter century, by a detail. It is a moment in Act IV, when Mrs. Sørbye announces that she is going to marry the merchant Werle. Dr. Relling, a minor character who overhears her, responds, “This can’t possibly be true?” Elias now notices Ibsen’s parenthetical stage direction—that Dr. Relling should ask the question “with a slight tremor in his voice.” All at once, Elias feels “an unendurable excitement,” because he senses that he is “on the track of something to which he had not previously paid any attention when trying to understand The Wild Duck.” Relling is known for his role as someone who comments sarcastically from the sidelines of the play, rather as a jaundiced teacher might do. One of his pronouncements is celebrated in Norwegian literature: “If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.” Elias had never been very interested in Relling, and yet he realizes, on this Monday morning, that Relling’s “slight tremor” is the key to a new opening. For a second, Elias thinks, Relling becomes a major character, and we see him “caught in his own bitter fate as a perpetual, unsuccessful admirer of Mrs. Sørbye, throughout her two marriages, first to Dr. Sørbye, now to Werle, and for a brief moment it is his fate, and nothing else, that is frozen into immobility on the stage. The moment of the minor figure.”

The teen-agers do not share their teacher’s excitement, and quickly file out when the lesson is over. It’s starting to rain. Elias stands in the schoolyard, trying to open a recalcitrant umbrella. Suddenly, the morning of anger and disappointment and the years of frustration and impotence come to a flash point. The senior schoolmaster now makes a fool of himself, savagely smashing his umbrella against the school’s fountain, cutting his hand, as the students look on. Worse, he takes the umbrella, holds it like a sword, and lunges toward some of those students, who move, pityingly, out of the way. As he marches from the yard and starts toward the center of Oslo, he realizes he can never return. His career is over.

We are thirty-eight pages into “Shyness and Dignity” (1996), by Norway’s most distinguished contemporary novelist, Dag Solstad. A conventional novel might follow Elias home, depicting the expected domestic consequences: Elias telling his wife, quarrelling with his children, seeking a colleague’s advice; Elias’s isolation and perhaps his ultimate renewal. These orderly, dramatic scenes would come appointed with the usual novelistic conveniences—dialogue, authorial stage directions (“with a slight tremor in his voice”), rising and falling action. Because it’s a novel by Dag Solstad, none of these conventionalities are entered into. Elias walks along the street and stops at a traffic circle, in sight of the Bislett sports stadium. The rest of this short novel—a hundred or so pages more—takes place at the traffic circle, as we circle around the interior of Elias’s mind. He thinks of his wife, Eva Linde, and how she’ll receive the calamitous news. What will they live on? He remembers meeting Eva for the first time, toward the end of the nineteen-sixties, when she was dating his best friend, Johan Corneliussen. The rest of the novel unspools as a single anguished remembrance, an internal monologue assisted by Solstad’s characteristically lengthy sentences, and paragraphs that go unbroken for many pages.

When Elias met Johan Corneliussen, they were students. Johan was marked out as a mind to watch, the one whose Ph.D. on Kant would be a major event, and who was sure to establish himself as a great philosopher. Elias was full of admiration: for Johan’s intellect, his life force, his glamorous success with women, the breadth of his interests. (“Johan Corneliussen moved without difficulty from ice hockey to Kant, from interest in advertising posters to the Frankfurt school of philosophy, from rock’n’roll to classical music.”) Modest Elias was full of gratitude that Johan had plucked him for friendship, and the asymmetry persisted when Johan introduced his girlfriend, Eva Linde. Elias was so dazzled by Eva’s beauty that he had to look away. Eva and Johan married in 1970, had a daughter later the same year; Elias remained the stunned, appreciative spectator—the lesser one, the comfy friend whose task was to reflect and accompany, the mirror to the lamp.

Standing by the traffic circle, Elias casts his mind over this strange love triangle and its unforeseen contortions. Johan did not become a great philosopher but quit academic life and quit his family, moving to the United States and leaving his wife and daughter behind. Within two years, Elias had married the abandoned Eva, overwhelmed that she would accept him. The French theorist René Girard would call this “mimetic desire,” but Elias doesn’t need Girard’s help: he is all too humbly conscious that, by a twist of luck, he has stolen into his best friend’s life “as the shadow of Johan Corneliussen that I am.” And he transfers to Eva the humble admiration that he once had for Johan. He is the rapt voyeur of her beauty. She remains oddly unapproachable. When they make love, she half turns her face from him. He surmises that she must love him, but she never says so. They are now two middle-aged people who are not intimate with each other. On this important day, as he gathers his spousal courage, he is “struck by a dreadful sense of estrangement.”

My outline is just the perimeter of this novel’s rich acreage. There is much comedy and real subtlety, both intellectual and human, in Solstad’s internal explorations. At no point does he make explicit the link between Elias’s charged discovery in Ibsen’s play and his subsequent reflection on the kind of life he has lived. The connection is for us to make, which means that we resemble Elias’s students: we must choose to notice the dramaturgy, the “slight tremor” that links Relling and Elias, and so choose to consider, with new empathy, “the moment of the minor figure.” For twenty-five years, Elias has overlooked Relling, because he has overlooked himself. The slight tremor in Relling’s voice alerts him to a human connection that is, in some sense, outside the language of literary criticism, or at least outside the protocols of pedagogy. It is unspeakable, as a tremor is barely detectable. But today Elias detects it, and Relling’s unimportant anguish prompts Elias to think about his own—as a loyal satellite of his best friend and then of his friend’s wife.

Or so we infer. But perhaps Elias’s apprehension is unconscious? Solstad’s refusal to spell out the explicit connection holds open the possibility that, even now, Elias may have failed to make the connection that is so obvious to the reader. The tremor can be detected but not quite measured.