THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT

Swedish author Stoopendaal’s ruminative, cerebral, darkly humorous novel follows one man’s search for his intellectual soul.

The social theory of the title concerns “a cognitive bias that means someone who’s incompetent is also incapable of understanding their own incompetence.” Would that refer to the narrator? His pontifications about controversial psychologist Jordan B. Peterson before having read the man’s work hint that neither his nor Peterson’s views need be taken seriously. Readers need not be fascinated by lightning rods like Peterson or Michel Houellebecq to follow the never-named narrator’s emotional, spiritual, and mental health journey during the increasingly hot Swedish spring and summer of 2018—reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus’, although Joyce is too old-modern to be mentioned here—but it wouldn’t hurt. The tale of that journey is interrupted by the insertion of a story, written by the narrator, in which Houellebecq appears as a fictionalized version of the narrator. (How closely the narrator represents Stoopendaal remains a question among many layers of meta to unpack here.) While a professed fan of “transgressive postmodern prose” like Houellebecq’s, the narrator lives as a “normie” in Gothenburg with a respectable civil service job and a girlfriend studying to be a librarian. Their Pomeranian, Molly—labeled by the narrator his “baby surrogate”—is the book’s most endearing character, perhaps because she’s a watcher, not a talker. The novel’s big dramatic moment, with comic undertones, occurs when the narrator wakes up hungover after a night of philosophic discourse and briefly can’t find Molly, whom his girlfriend has left temporarily in his care. Molly turns up safe in the laundry hamper, but the narrator’s horrified remorse over his irresponsibility causes him to stop drinking and consider the Bible. Otherwise, there’s not much plot. The narrator describes his dreams, his drinking, his slightly confused sex life, and a lot of conversations. Expect to be bombarded by both high- and lowbrow cultural references, including footnotes.

An often funny, occasionally tedious satire steeped in the “transgressive postmodern prose” it purports to spoof.