NORWAY’S IMPORTANT NEW VOICE

Jets have made the world a much smaller sphere than it used to be. But forces older, deeper and more complicated than jet propulsion have made the modern middle class an even smaller world within the shrunken world.

There are clues in fiction as well as fact now and again that there exists a kind of global emotional uniformity which is indifferent to boundaries, languages and a nation’s politics, and which reflects only the tremors of the stateless heart and the international pursuits of private happiness and fulfillment.

I don’t mean to load too much on “The Honeymoon,” a slim, well-executed and incendiary novel by the Norwegian Knut Faldbakken, which has just been published here (St. Martin’s Press: $15.95, 233 pp.). But what seems most remarkable about his very erotic tale of the collapse of an apparently perfect marriage is that it could have been written, with only minor changes of scenery, in Palo Alto or Port Huron, Ann Arbor, Oxford or Paris, Helsinki, Rome, Bombay or Tokyo--indeed, wherever there is a feeling middle class.

In a more general sense, the location is wherever men imagine they understand women and women are sure, with some reason, that they don’t. The terrain equally is wherever women imagine that men don’t suffer when relationships go awry, but men know all too well the chill, dank pains of love gone dead.

Faldbakken’s narrator is a newsman just finishing a book on the male responses to feminine liberation. He thinks only the women’s side has been heard for a decade; it’s time to say more about male pain.

He and his wife, a teacher, are off to a mountain resort for a literary seminar, an outing he hopes will also be a second honeymoon. He couldn’t be more content with their 13-year marriage. But there are those little signs of stress in the domesticity--a certain testiness in his wife, who against all good sense has taken up smoking again, an implicit sign of defiance if there ever was one.

The week is, of course, a disaster. He finds he has a rival, a fat poet. The poet’s lady is an old love of his, but he finds her fresh attentions more depressing than pleasing. In a climate of mutual accusation, his wife reveals not only an impatience (of earthquake force) with his tidy complacency, but also a pent-up erotic drive that frightens and enrages him. She admits to meaningless infidelities (though not, by a nice irony, with the poet).

In the novel’s lacerating furies, it is “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” with a Norwegian accent. In its revelation of two long-married people understanding so little of each other’s inmost selves, it is Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” Unique to Faldbakken, it is steamy and funny in about equal doses. On the way home the couple’s car runs out of gas and, with perfect symbolism, they blame each other.

The author was in Los Angeles last week, lecturing at UCLA. He’s written nine novels, but “The Honeymoon” is the first to appear in English. This seems the more curious because he’s popular throughout Europe, with sales of more than a million copies. In Norway “The Honeymoon” sold 110,000 copies in three months, amazing in a country with a total population of only 4 million.

It is also a best seller elsewhere in Scandinavia and in Germany. Faldbakken has been translated into a dozen languages, including Russian. Tall, slim, handsome and cheerfully confident, he attended the University of Oslo and then left to become a cabin steward on a Norwegian-American liner--”serving American tourists in the South Pacific,” he said, grinning, at a reception given in his honor by the Norwegian consul general.

He started writing on shipboard and returned home, determined to write full time. He lived, very cheaply, in London and several European cities before he became self-sustaining. He has been married twice.

The translation by Liv Myhre reads unobtrusively and well, and Faldbakken, whose own English is excellent, thinks it does him justice. He is an important new voice, and if “The Honeymoon” is a success, we will likely see more of his backlog. (A second, “Adam’s Diary,” is due from University of Nebraska Press.) Faldbakken has in “The Honeymoon” brought off the careful trick of creating a first-person narrator who is near to but not quite the author himself (the narrator being less humorous and less perceptive than the author).

Yet Faldbakken, like his alter ego, has no doubt that there are real male casualties in the latter-day misapprehensions between men and women, and he thinks it’s time for more light and less heat. That unconscious chauvinists need love, too, is a notion you might find in several languages--as well as Norwegian.