What happens to us as children, as teens on the cusp of adulthood, on the edge of trying to become ourselves, can make or break us. Grappling with childhood loss has been one of the great themes of Per Petterson’s work, and he returns to that in I Refuse.
Tommy and Jim were best friends, inseparable, for as long as they could remember. There was no particular reason why, except perhaps because they lived in a small community and there weren’t many other boys.
Both grew up without at least one parent. Jim never knew his father. Neither did anyone else in the neighborhood; his mother arrived one day with him as an infant.
Tommy’s mother was gone one day when he was quite young. She packed school lunches for him, his sister Siri and their two young twin sisters, and was gone. Their father is a cruel man who beats them. One day Tommy stands up for himself and his sisters. Their father, although injured, takes off. He and Siri clean up the house and believe that they can just carry on as before, except without the beatings. And Tommy also knows it will be without comforting his sisters as he had before; he knows the things he is feeling are very, very wrong. The authorities, of course, break them apart and board up their house.
Jim is considered the talented one, the smart one, the one who will make something of himself. No one expects anything of Tommy, who is taken in by a neighbor. But it’s Tommy who becomes successful.
Since the novel goes back and forth in time, the Jim and Tommy we first meet are nearing the end of middle age. They haven’t seen each other in years. Jim is finishing up, as he does most mornings, on a bridge fishing with other down-and-outers.
On the way to the bridge, an old man ran out of the darkness and hit Jim's car. Both driver and pedestrian appear stunned. Then the man takes off. Jim thinks it’s his father, but it cannot be, because he has never seen his father so couldn’t recognize him. Jim has spent many mornings there since suffering a breakdown at a new job. A Mercedes stops as he is leaving. It’s Tommy, who puts his foot in his mouth about how well he’s doing and who has to move on because of traffic backing up behind him.
But all isn’t as it seems. Superficially, Tommy is as rich as Croesus and Jim is as poor as a church mouse. They do have some things in common. Neither has had a lasting, loving relationship. They both feel hollow, empty inside. Their days have little meaning. They miss the promise of what life had seemed to hold when they were boys, when they were friends.
Early one morning, after a night lightly carousing, they come upon the trench that is being dug to bring telephones into their tiny village. No one is up. It will be hours before the workmen arrive. They hop in and start digging. The joy they feel as they work until they’re so tired they could drop, singing and working in perfect harmony, is the happiest scene in the novel.
Because this is Petterson, we do learn what happened when their friendship fell apart, but we don’t learn why these things occurred. Petterson makes readers fill in the blanks. He doesn’t lay it all out there.
What he does do is present an intricate picture that is as deeply emotional as it is structured with complexity. Petterson goes back and forth in time, uses different tenses, different points of view, the same scenes from different perspectives and crucial information casually dropped. There are near-misses when you think it’s obvious characters will meet and some meetings that make you wonder who the people really are.
Petterson, and his translator, Don Bartlett, have sentences and paragraphs that can be short and terse or long and lyrical. The translation is a tour de force of what beautiful writing can look like when it is interpreted through the prism of a new language.
In the end, Jim and Tommy follow two different paths. One displays what may seem a surprising resilience, but looks like a willingness to seize an opportunity when it isn’t even certain that an opportunity has presented itself. The other character refuses to take a chance. One lives with regret, the other with the knowledge that things, good things have passed him by but is still taking each day as it comes.
The closest Petterson comes to explaining the differences in their characters is, as usual, elliptical:
“Do you think it’s true what they say about the cogwheel and your conscience.”
“No, what.”
“Well, your conscience is like a cogwheel, or even like a circular saw, whirring around, and its sharp teeth are biting into your soul, hurting like hell and each time you do something really bad your blood is spurting, but then you do more and more bad things and the teeth are ground down and your soul becomes all calloused and then you don’t feel anything when the wheel goes round and then that’s who you are.”
Petterson’s view of time is connected to this cogwheel:
… is time like an empty sack you can stuff any number of things into, does it never go just from here to there, but instead in circles, round and round so that every single time the wheel has turned, you are back where you started.
So time moves Petterson’s characters in a wheel at the same time that their consciences are shredding their souls as they whip around every time they do something bad (not wrong, but bad).
These are damaged people who don’t heal. The main question appears to be who can live with that and who cannot.
The two women who are briefly the focus in this novel are treated as elliptically as the male characters. Their stories hint at fascinating lives and feelings. This glance at one of them is why I hope Petterson is brave enough to take on a female protagonist and be less obtuse in depicting her inner life:
He waited for a sign from her, and she did half turn, but didn’t really pause and didn’t wave, and suddenly he realised how sinister it was, the scene that was being played out here in the gloom on the quay right now, as though what she did was letting her soul sink into the well of perdition with no more than a hurried, already vacant glance over her shoulder before she let go and fell, and whatever warmth she might have had, she snuffed out like a burnt-down candle. She took nothing with her, she left nothing behind.
Some people may wonder why anyone would deliberately seek out what looks on the surface to be such morose writing. But that’s not how Petterson’s work affects me. It is deeply moving, an unencumbered look at how disappointment or hurt affect people. Because these are things that matter, because these kinds of hurt can so deeply affect people, reading work such as Petterson’s and reflecting how different circumstances affect different characters makes me feel closer to people.
We may not know what hurt another person may carry inside, but we can know that it never hurts to treat another person as if they are in pain. It’s empathy or basic consideration of our common humanity, how we may not have walked a mile in their shoes but we can realize that they have traveled far in their footgear.
Or, as Willy Loman told me so many years ago, “Attention must be paid.” I refuse to ignore them, just as one character refused to listen to his heart and the other refused to let others tell him to not listen. One refuses to live, the other refuses to give up on life.
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