Why not end a novel in mid-thought? Life is like that.

I guess Dag Solstad's style at least in his 1996 novel (1st to be translated into English), Shyness & Dignity, is just totally weird and he's not trying to reach a wider readership, rather a coterie of devoted fans of narrative peculiarity and experimentation; I can see why Karl Ove Knausgaard might look up to DS as an inspiration and possibly a mentor - KOK's narration goes off on long tangents and can at times focus on the minutia of memory and sensibility - but there's something almost willfully perverse about Solstad's style. In this short novel w/out chapters and w/ only a handful of section breaks, we, first, meet the main character (Elias) on a day that he has a nervous breakdown at the h.s. where he teaches English; then we get the back story of E's college friendship with an older student, who abandons wife and daughter, and the extremely shy and inexperienced E moves in w/ wife (Eva) and later marries her; then we hear how his love for his wife has diminished and we get a long and sad segment in which we learn about how E feels the world has left him and his generation in its wake, the feels alone and friendless and as if he's wasted his life - and then we snap back to the present (day of the breakdown) and leave E in despair at a street crossing. I don't want to give a spoiler, but have to note that - huh? what kind of ending is this? Are we to surmise that he steps into traffic and dies? Or that he ambles on home and tells Eva that he has been an ass and is likely to lose his job? What? But Solstad, as noted, will thumb his nose at narrative convention - and just end this novel in mid-thought. He could have gone on, but why bother? Don't expect a sense of an ending; life is not like that, nor should fiction be, at least in this case. I did like some of the writing in the sad third segment of this novel, particularly the sorrow of Elias overhearing a fellow teacher (a math teacher, much younger) make a passing reference to Hans Castorph (?), and Elias begins to obsess about this teacher, how to befriend him, should he invite him to dinner, and on and on - in fact behaving very much like the indecisive Hans himself - almost expected him to ask the math teacher if he could borrow a pencil. Elias speculates that he himself would make a good character in a Mann novel, and imagines novelists holding something like casting calls to select characters: Would he meet Mann's criteria? Kind of a funny concept, and a jarring one that affects our reading of this novel - I can't remember another novel in which a character speculated about whether he could or should be a character in another author's book (closest I can think of would be Woody Allen's great story The Kugelmass Episode). 

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