In 2024, it isn’t difficult to find a work of metafiction, whether you’re looking for a cult classic like Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler …” or something more recent like Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning “Interior Chinatown.” Venturing into the world of meta-nonfiction is a little more challenging. This approach makes the process of assembling the book an essential part of the narrative and, as such, you aren’t reading a book on a given subject as much as you’re reading a book about writing a book on a given subject.

As with metafiction, it’s incredibly difficult to pull off. But when it works it can be revelatory, telling the reader plenty about both the ostensible subject of the book and the way that we think about it or them today. John D’Agata aced it in “About a Mountain,” and his enthusiastic blurb on the back cover of Matthew J. C. Clark’s debut, “Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences,” is a good indication of what readers are in for here.

Local review

“Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences”

By Matthew J. C. Clark

University of Iowa Press

$20

A guy named Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson is at the center, but the book is just as much about its author – and how Clark navigates big questions of art, politics and privilege during a series of dramatic national events.

Clark recounts “Bjarki, Not Bjarki” in a chronologically fragmented manner, which sounds imposing on paper but turns out to be relatively accessible. The book begins with Clark leaving Maine temporarily to stay at a friend’s condo; there’s a passing reference to Clark’s separation from his wife. There’s also the matter of flooring. “I’ve been outsmarted, hoodwinked, bamboozled by a floor,” he tells a friend. Readers may be wondering just how a floor could be capable of such things. In the pages that follow, Clark provides an answer.

A few chapters in, Clark explains how he first came into Bjarki’s orbit: Home renovations brought them together. Clark and his wife had moved from Wyoming to Bath, a homecoming of sorts as Clark grew up in Woolwich. Clark met Bjarki, when he bought new floorboards from Bjarki’s business in Mercer, The Wood Mill of Maine.

It isn’t hard to see why Clark was drawn to Bjarki: His attention to detail and the work that he does make him an interesting figure, and he’s fond of bold declarations and irreverent remarks. The German-Icelandic Bjarki grew up in an affluent family, has experience sailing competitively and brags about flying planes without a license. “[I]t seemed like Bjarki was auditioning to be a really exciting character in a magazine-style essay,” writes Clark, a carpenter and writer.

Gradually, Clark makes the reader aware of the ways in which his worldview and Bjarki’s don’t entirely line up. “Bjarki’s pretty into politics, which used to drive me nuts, but I don’t care so much about that part of him anymore. I’m trying to focus on my own patriotism, if I can,” he writes early on. The timeline of the book includes both the Trump presidency and the pandemic, providing plenty of occasions in which the two men don’t see eye to eye – to say nothing of discussions of gun ownership and political protests.

To say that this is a book about two men finding common ground despite their ideological differences would not be entirely accurate. For one thing, the more Clark reveals about Bjarki’s politics and relationship to the U.S., the more complicated matters become. And for all that Bjarki’s name is in the title (twice), this is a book about far more than just him or his business, or even the strains on Clark’s marriage. It turns out that writing about wood means writing about trees, and writing about trees leads Clark to discussing everything from the European colonization of Maine to the impact the logging industry has had on the state’s woods.

In the end, that’s what might be “Bjarki, Not Bjarki’s” most compelling aspect. Like the best meta-nonfiction, this book is something of a juggling act. Beyond the interpersonal drama and the ways in which Clark and Bjarki reckon with local and national news, we are in suspense through the book about whether or not Clark will be able to pull off the necessary narrative balancing act. In the right hands, a story about a larger-than-life business owner can become something grander. With this book, Clark ably demonstrates how.

New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of four books, most recently the novel “Ex-Members.” He has reviewed books for The New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.