The worst idea ever for a podcast – and it’s great: Our Struggle reviewed

Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to talk around Knausgaard. Or to talk through Knausgaard, towards the sense of what the Knausgaard phenomenon means. Or, it sometimes seems, they want to talk about everything but Knausgaard — cigarettes, Constance Garnett, the history of literary criticism, to what extent hotness is a function of tallness, Clarice Lispector, media hype, backlash, cancel culture, sneakers, Gen X, how Geoff Dyer got where he did — until the only territory left uncovered by the conversation is Knausgaard himself, described only through omission, in negative outline, raising yet another cigarette to his smouldering, craggy face.

Lauren and Drew are the hosts of Our Struggle, a paratextual, parasocial and occasionally somewhat parasexual podcast about the experience of reading the Norwegian author’s six-book memoir-cum-novel-cum-lawsuit-magnet, My Struggle. It goes without saying that the show is itself a Knausgaardian enterprise, some 20 hours in now, with no end, or even structure, in sight. Unlike in Knausgaard though, there’s a twist: Our Struggle has become the breakout podcast hit of the year in transatlantic literary circles. Even more surprising, it’s great: hip, amicable, funny, the worst idea for a podcast ever conceived, spun out, somehow, as an absurdist performance of itself.

The standout episodes tend to be those featuring guests drawn from the world of literary criticism, some of whom are voluble and self-deprecating, some of whom are laconic and collected, some of whom are gossipy and self-involved. I admit that my tolerance for literary gossip is higher than that of the average punter, but for now I’ll name no names. Listening, I’ve learnt about which readings Karl Ove looked best at (he is extremely good-looking), how to pronounce his name (which can’t be transliterated), Henry James’s theory of the novel.