REVIEW: What Can Love Survive? On Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only

This isn’t romance. It’s endurance art.

Recently, I purchased a terrible bag of coffee from a local shop out of desperation. We'd been out for two days and woke to our morning routine disturbed by a sheer inability to make a list, to carry out a simple task.

That morning I'd woken up, as certain of this tragedy as I had been the morning prior. Then shame crept in: If you knew it was a problem, why didn't you solve it before it got worse? So I dressed and stepped out with my dog at 6:45 a.m. We wandered slowly over to the café, aware that it opened at 7, and in addition to a large coffee, I got the bag of beans, sensing that I should be punished for this unorganized way of living by paying a premium for a mediocre product.

I've been reading in a similarly scattered way. The space I work out of doubles as a lending library, primarily for fiction, and I've several times wandered the aisles with little scrutiny, picking books up, reading a page, two, and putting them down. Between long writing projects, I feel unmoored and emotionally fickle. In this state, reading becomes akin to my experience of late-night grocery shopping, where I wander the produce section, groping foreign vegetables, sniffing them, and placing them in a basket with no foresight or plan. I follow intrigue and hope that some more primal part of me can best parse out what I currently need.

I picked up Vigdis Hjorth's If Only because of the cover. It's a striking red photograph by the Norwegian artist Anja Niemi, and I was drawn to how unnatural it looks, the glamorous woman staring at a copy of herself in the bathtub. It's called "The Socialite." I liked the idea of this book on my nightstand, in my bag, the uniform red color throughout the front and back felt soothing in its staged strangeness.

Published in its original Norwegian in 2001 and translated into English in 2024, If Only is about a doomed romance between a playwright, Ida, and an academic, Arnold Bush. It's about obsession, self-destruction, and cycles. It's also about traps, mental and emotional. You might say it's about love.

Though the novel is split into two parts, the first is a mere page and a half: a brief note that the older Ida makes to her younger self. It's the first page of the novel and yet, it's too late; the warning signs have not been heeded, we know, because part two opens on a curiously simple sentence: "A relatively young woman, aged thirty." When I was grazing through the bookshelves, alone on a weekend afternoon in the library, I'd almost missed that first part. Looking back, I can't remember having read it at all, so subsuming are the pages that follow. Yet even if that page and a half is entirely forgettable, it's also essential. It's proof that life continued for our protagonist before the reader can truly grasp at what cost.

Ida and Arnold meet at a seminar for dramatists and spend the night together. Both are married with children, neither lives in the town where the seminar is held, and by all accounts, the encounter feels like a one-off. Ida isn't even Arnold's first pick—before she suggests he stay in her room, he caresses another woman's hand at dinner and is promptly rejected. Ida observes this gesture, finding it bold. She gets the dregs of him that night—he is the remaining man awake. A pale academic who will visit her presentation the next morning in a dirty button-down and make a snide comment about the difference between academics and playwrights. Two pages into the novel, knowing little about Ida, the reader has already learned to scrutinize her judgment of men.

So begins the first of two cycles.

I think about the reading experience a lot. I observe my willingness and desire to return to a book, day after day, sometimes hour after hour. This rarely has to do with pace or plottiness, but rather some inscrutable quality of the voice. I want that person's writing in my ear, I want to hear them talk and talk and talk. I want to watch them live, see how they think, see how they suffer. I like to feel I understand them, but I also like to feel completely isolated from their morality. Sometimes I am chasing the feeling I have when I am reading something—a low-level agitation, an unsettling, an amphetamine-like itch I want to be rid of, only to have it start again.

Part two of the novel details the affair between Ida and Arnold, mostly from Ida's point of view. I spent a little under two weeks on If Only, reading a book in the middle, because it was often unbearable to follow Ida through her first cycle and then, the second. I read the novel exclusively in bed, mostly at night, but sometimes in the morning. Sophie Haigney wrote in The Paris Review that she had to put If Only down every fifty pages because it was so difficult to be with the narrator for too long a time, and my experience was similar. I mean this as a compliment. Ida is an intense woman, deeply invested in her grief and heartache. She's all pulse, all nerve, all feeling. In Hjorth's words, Ida:

...feels the fabric of her dress against her legs... She feels the leather insole of her shoe against the sole of her foot. She feels the straps of her bra, the knicker elastic against her hip, thigh against thigh, the fabric of the seat pad, the table under her elbow, the glass against her lips. She can feel the moon's yearning for water, the hot core of the Earth, the will of the stars, she is magnetic and electric and feverish.

You have to know that this level of yearning is unsustainable, yet Hjorth sustains it for the better part of the novel. This level of bodily alertness isn't about love, but rather about a kind of primal need to possess. A little over twenty pages into the novel, Ida is infatuated with Arnold, reckless in her feelings. As I winnowed down the pages, I began to feel a strange sense of accomplishment, thinking that surely anytime now this woman would grow bored, change course, find another. I realized that I wanted to be out of her obsession, that it was beginning to feel claustrophobic. But that was precisely the point of Ida's emotional state: magnetic, electric, feverish. Why should the reader suffer less than her?

Among writers, the reading experience is often described in (and reduced to) craft elements—pacing, propulsion. Here, I am interested in concretizing the experience by abstracting it a bit, because the cycles of this book, mimicking the emotional cycles of my reading, quickly overshadowed any interest I had in the novel as a lesson in writing. Much of what carried me through the second part of this book—long, painful, and repetitive, with few section breaks and abrupt passages of time—had to do with my familiarity with that yearning, with Hjorth's deft description of a person who feels, year after year, like a starved dog. Ida's obsession with the reclusive, seemingly uninterested Arnold is maddening.

This is not to diminish what I think is still masterful writing; Hjorth is the author of twenty books to date, and she knows what she's doing. If Only thrives in its relentless commitment to creating an emotional turbulence that feels akin to a performance piece. Page after page, I'd begun to see Ida as a kind of Kafkaesque hunger artist, a woman determined to survive on her own delusions and obsessions, remote from the realities of her life.

As a translated novel, it remains entirely accessible and geographically neutral—little time is spent on the cultural particularities of Ida's town of Oslo, or Arnold's town of Trondheim. Perhaps this neutrality is what allowed me to so easily graft my own experiences onto those of Ida and Arnold. There's nothing particularly Scandinavian about the book, short of, I suppose, the very idea that these two people have made a living from writing plays, discussing poets, and generally engaging in literary discourse, an anomaly here in the States.

Their meals are the ordinary meals of chicken and sandwiches, salmon, salads. Their affair is confined to hotels, rented apartments, small cafés, airport lounges—places of transit. Their drinks are wine, champagne, and beer. Arnold and Ida are always drinking. They drink together and alone, in sadness and in celebration. As I read, I began to anticipate the scenes where, inevitably, one or both would have to drink as a consequence of what happened prior. I was learning to read the relationship like a character with its own tics and syndromes, learning what it needed. Often, that was a drink.

In the first half of part two, Ida is alone in her obsession. She hangs on Arnold's every word (there are few), savors every morsel of attention he grants her (again, few of those), and in the process, neglects her husband and children, ultimately choosing to end her marriage in order to essentially torture herself in peace. You learn little of her husband, only that he seems to be an altogether reasonable, albeit boring man. Of course, his greatest flaw is simply that he is not Arnold.

***

Dorothy Tennov published Love and Limerence in 1979, a book chronicling her work with patients who'd described an infatuation that felt beyond the scope of love. I first learned about this book years ago, in the process of researching what I could do, short of a lobotomy, to rid myself of a debilitating cycle of obsession and heartache. Like Ida, I cycled through grief and ecstasy, uncertain that I would survive either emotion when I was in the throes of it. Tennov coined the term limerence, an altogether different emotion from love, to describe "an uncontrollable, biologically determined, inherently irrational, instinct-like reaction" to a person.

Something animal, as alarming and essential as hunger. For Tennov, these Limerent Objects (LOs) are puppeteers that take hold of us, rendering notions of free will impossible. They determine our moods, they set the pace of our day, they eradicate the existence of other issues. The further I got into If Only, the more it resembled the relationship one might have with an LO: Ida and her maddening interior monologue clouded my day; Hjorth's visceral portrayal of this lopsided affair felt like a fog I could not see past. I simultaneously dreaded and craved the inevitable night, when I'd return to the novel.

Ida's concerns in the first half of the novel—her writing career, her bumbling husband, her needy children—are reduced to nuisances that keep her from focusing her attention on Arnold, though he remains largely absent. To trap Arnold, to prove her emotions are indeed real, Ida is willing to humiliate herself for years. Hjorth seems fixated on exploring a woman's self-debasement as a kind of endurance act.

The cyclical nature of the narrative also stems from Ida's inability to remember her own wounds. According to Tennov, "for the process [of limerence] to develop fully, some form of uncertainty or doubt, or even some threat to reciprocation appears necessary." Doubt encircles Ida; it girdles every interaction she has with Arnold, and it presides over her sense of self. In her artistic pursuits, Ida is confident and headstrong; in her Arnold pursuit, she is apprehensive. But consistent.

The plot unfolds in much the same way—Ida's expectations are not met, her plans are thwarted, her attention is not reciprocated. Pages of this, scene after scene, unfolding in the same way. Ida is alone in her love, and the reader cannot fault Arnold, not yet: he rarely promises to call or visit, he makes no attempt at initiating contact, and on the rare occasions that he does, he makes clear that they are beholden to children, to their spouses. He makes headway in his work, attends events at which Ida is present, and treats her with no more warmth than any other stranger. Uncertainty and doubt fuel her desire for him.

In my own work and in the work of other contemporary writers, I often encounter a cool narrator—a removed, morally scrubbed character intent on showing me their world without imposing their opinion of it. A modern-day Meursault devoid of agency on a kind of conveyor belt of their life. Ida, conversely, never stops asserting her agency over the situation. She creates an occasion out of expecting a call from Arnold and then agonizes over the silent phone. She shouts into oblivion (conveyed in all caps) and goes out drinking. She makes a fool of herself, reflects on the reality of that experience, and then does it again. She's alive to every one of her emotions, even if they repeat themselves, scene to scene, page to page. Rejection, hope, elation, rejection, hope, elation. Rejection.

Eventually, Ida's intention to trap Arnold works, and it is as if a window has been opened in the dark, stuffy house of the novel. Unlike him, Ida left her marriage early and quickly, surefooted in her efforts to change her life. Arnold, conversely, succumbs to Ida because his marriage is failing. The undergraduates he continually beds will not take him in; Ida will.

I'd wondered if the emotional trajectory I'd experienced would come about in the narrative: a person gets what they want, and it loses its luster. Ida would see Arnold's balding head, his recklessness, his haughtiness. Or as noted in Love and Limerence: "In the laboratory, it was found that prolonged exposure to the imprinting object or person was unnecessary. In fact, the attachment could be undermined by too much familiarity."

But this doesn't happen. Instead, Ida strengthens her commitment to Arnold and triggers another cycle.

Toward the end of the book, I found myself unable to face the bright red cover in the night. That excruciating feeling returned, and I wondered if I was unable to sustain the page count because I was a woman projecting my own humiliation onto Ida, onto Hjorth. Here was a character willing, it seemed, to look past every abhorrent trait her partner presented. Studying the scenes in that second half of the book, you notice Hjorth's attention to Ida's happiness waver—short, thin passages of drunken sex, of the couple eating a meal in calm are juxtaposed with long, expository scenes of Ida's anguish after learning about another of Arnold's infidelities, or Ida's anxiety and guilt after leaving Arnold briefly to tend to a work event. To have fun. He latches onto her joy and drains her of it; she worries that he will leave her if she doesn't return home quickly enough to pick up one of his calls. He threatens to, and cries often. I found myself in bed at night, putting the book down, picking it back up. Exasperated, angry, tired, waiting for the saga to end. Like Ida must have felt.

In the calmer scenes, lasting a sentence or two, the couple is described working together in the afternoons, spread throughout some rental house like cats. The scenes of their domestication feel forced, strange in their scarcity throughout the narrative. I had no impulse to savor their happiness, no sense of respite. Happiness was deeply unnatural in this book.

Hjorth isn't interested in chronicling the rise and fall of a difficult love affair, but rather in presenting a portrait of love's ability to deteriorate a person. Ida's eventual decision to give up on the relationship isn't made in response to one of Arnold's particularly egregious behaviors; it comes from a place of fatigue, akin to my reading experience of this novel.

When I finished reading the book, it was a Tuesday morning. I swept it off my nightstand and returned it to the library that very day, like an ill-fated amulet I had to be rid of. Still, I thought about Ida constantly. I talked about the book with writer-friends, asking them if they'd read it. "Did you like it?" they would ask, and I didn't know how to answer the question. "I survived it," felt like a more apt response. Still, I wanted everyone to read the novel, to feel its strange, hypnotizing effect, to wallow and wander in it as I had. I wanted to know when others had read it, and how. In public? At night? Quickly? Mostly, I wanted to know if others had understood Ida's self-sabotage as intimately as I had. Did the prospect of endless suffering through a romance shimmer as bright for them as it did for Ida and me?