Jonas Karlsson’s new novel begins with an annoyance: An astronomically large invoice arrives for an unnamed narrator. “A scam!” our hero thinks. “A mistake!” he thinks again. Many would dissolve immediately into irritation, but our hero merely chuckles it off and goes about his simple, content day.
But when he begins to receive reminders to pay his bill and contacts the terrifyingly generic World Resources Distribution agency, he learns that the invoice represents the price of all the contentment, meaning, and joy he has had thus far. The WRD has calculated the value of his experience of life, and this, in short, is the cost of his existence.
And terrifying as that, alone, may be, his problems are even greater than those of his neighbors and friends, all of whom have received invoices of their own. Our hero has accrued perhaps the greatest debt in the whole country. Even worse—he has no way to pay.
This sort of strange, bureaucratic fable is not Jonas Karlsson’s first. The author made waves with his hilarious debut novel The Room, published in English in 2015, which concerns an oblivious, borderline-insane nuisance of an office worker. In The Room, Karlsson showed us the experience of a man who cannot understand a very different problem: In his office at “the Authority,” there is a room that only he can see. This room is fantastic: It allows him to accomplish work more effectively than ever before. The little problems of the office—paper sliding onto his desk, interpersonal annoyances—fade away. And indeed, these little difficulties tend to irk him endlessly. But within the room, he is efficient, brilliant, content. So why won’t his coworkers admit that it exists? His battles over the existence of the room are hilarious, if mean.
For all the ways that The Room was cruel, The Invoice is sweet. While the central character in The Room is oblivious to his own ineptitude, in The Invoice, obliviousness gives rise to joy. Karlsson gives us a glimpse of a convincingly happy life. And while that experience is funny, it is also sincere.
One of Karlsson’s greatest strengths is showing us how different characters experience their world: what they see, and where they are blind. Perhaps this is not a surprise, given his career path: First a successful actor in his native Sweden, Karlsson moved to playwriting before trying his hand at fiction. Perhaps his experience inhabiting these roles has helped make his narrators so compelling.
Indeed, it is the hero here, not the hook, that makes The Invoice. Our narrator does not understand that he is happy, and so his happiness is believable. Upon receiving his invoice, he thinks there must be some mistake: How could his life be so highly valued? He is an underachiever. He lives alone, working part-time at a video rental store. His one love affair ended long ago. Surely the rich and adventurous and beautiful must live better.
But as Karlsson demonstrates, the value of an experience is not so easy to estimate. Joyful experiences for our hero include eating pizza, watching movies, and peeling stickers off desks. Somehow, this unwittingly zen narrator has stumbled into the most richly expensive life there is and must now pay for his natural state of quiet bliss.
With this absurd premise, Karlsson sweeps through what it means to be happy. Of course, joy is individual, a great secret that can never be detected or measured. Joy is an interpretation, inherently subjective: What is joyful for some causes anxiety for others. And it is difficult to understand the joy of another. The magic of Karlsson’s work is that he manages to convey real joy, the pleasure of a life captured in little actions. The traditional “big things”—death and love—do not overshadow these little moments, nor do the little moments resolve and symbolize the great. Peeling a sticker off a desk is an amusing diversion; it does not need to represent the futility of existence to play a role in the construction of joy.
Karlsson’s magic trick is the narrator’s as well, for the most winning passages here are the narrator’s interactions with the WRD employee he finally reaches over the telephone. Like all rational people who receive a big unexpected bill, our hero attempts to negotiate the sum down. He argues his unhappiness—yes, he has felt anxiety; yes, he has experienced loss—and at every turn his interlocutor highlights his experience of his events.
Explaining happiness means seeing through another’s eyes. Both Jonas Karlsson and our hero try to show us how to see the world in a new way, to find the experience in a film clip or a slice of pizza. And despite a potentially too-cute premise, The Invoice delivers a thoroughly engaging and winsome tale that does just that.
Tara Barnett is a writer in Washington.
