Small Talk

The novel takes place over the course of a single night in Stockholm, though its narrative repeatedly moves backwards through the lives of its central couple. Magnus is a forty-one-year-old Swedish political journalist; Meredith is his thirty-four-year-old American girlfriend, a beauty influencer who came to Sweden almost accidentally and remained because she fell in love with him. The novel begins at 2:23 in the morning, after they have returned from the fortieth-birthday dinner of Magnus’s old university friend Felix Cederqvist. Magnus and Meredith are having sex, and Magnus suddenly becomes intensely conscious of the fact that he is not wearing a condom. The condoms are within reach. They normally begin without one and introduce it before he ejaculates, but on this particular night the delay feels charged with significance. Magnus begins wondering whether he is simply following their usual routine or silently approaching the most consequential decision of his life.

Magnus considers his relationship with Meredith the first genuinely good romance of his life. His previous girlfriend, Elsa, treated relationships as battles over attention, knowledge and emotional dominance. Magnus calls the accumulated resentment between them “Hate Ocean”: a body of hostility always present beneath even their quieter interactions. Elsa demanded access to every thought he had and interpreted privacy as betrayal. Meredith, by contrast, announced early in their relationship that they were entitled to keep secrets from one another. She regards complete knowledge of another person as neither possible nor desirable.

Meredith’s emotional style initially confused Magnus. She is theatrical, speaks as though addressing an invisible audience and frequently turns ordinary statements into grand pronouncements. Yet she is not manipulative in the way he initially fears. She is generous with praise, rarely sulks, forgives quickly and appears genuinely delighted by life. Magnus gradually concludes that her performance is not false: theatricality is simply part of who she is.