The Norwegian novelist Per Petterson’s new book, “I Refuse,” opens with a startling event, a rare spike of adrenaline in this meditative and melancholy story. Jim is driving through the pre-dawn, heading to the Ulvoya suspension bridge (fishing off the bridge is the one thing that gives his life any shape), when a figure plunges into the road. Jim, braking, is certain the man has been injured, but no: He steadies himself against the hood. “For a moment I thought it was my father. But it wasn’t my father. I had never seen my father.” The man lurches off without a word; Jim, a little shaken, drives on to his usual fishing spot, where a short time later, he is recognized — though the two have not met for 35 years — by Tommy, commuting to work in his new Mercedes.  It becomes clear toward the end of the book that these two incidents (the near collision, which Jim quickly forgets, and the chance meeting of two old friends) are intricately connected, but the connection is not articulated or made explicit. It is so delicately done that even as you notice it you doubt it: Perhaps you have seen something that isn’t there. But this is a novel that requires some degree of self-assembly.  The scene with the stranger on the road sets up the novel’s themes: lost parents, chance, the absolute unknowable mystery of other people. In “I Refuse,” as in Petterson’s celebrated novel “Out Stealing Horses,” the tone is relentlessly autumnal. Petterson’s protagonists are men whose lives came adrift long ago, whose pasts are still holding them to account. (His debut, “Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes,” being published here simultaneously with “I Refuse,” may be lighter in tone, but it confirms that the author has been digging away at screwed-up blue-collar Norwegian boyhood since 1987.) Tommy acknowledges this during his awkward conversation with Jim on the bridge. It’s an unusual Petterson passage in that it spells things out:  “ ‘And here you are on this bridge, fishing, with your cap on, and here I come, in this car. It didn’t come cheap, I can tell you that much. But I can afford it. Hell, I could have bought two, or more, if I wanted, cash down. Isn’t it strange,’ he said with a smile.  “ ‘The way things can turn out. The ­opposite.’ ”  Tommy’s clumsy remark establishes the central puzzle of the novel. A lifetime ago, Jim, the clever, good-looking son of a churchgoing teacher, was the one expected to make something of himself. Rough, truculent Tommy was a write-off. His shadowy mother put herself first and ran away, leaving Tommy and his three sisters (to whom he was incestuously close) with their violent father. Before long, the father vanished too, and the siblings were separated by the authorities.  In a series of flashbacks Petterson shows us the short straws and dropped batons that took the boys in different directions, the small quiet moments that forged their friendship and then pulled it apart. Yet the more time we spend with the 50-something Tommy and Jim, the more they have in common.  One man may look at first glance like a success (Tommy has an office on the 10th floor, makes pots of cash and, like Jay Gatsby, has wardrobes full of pressed shirts), and the other may look like a failure (Jim suffers from panic attacks and is on sick leave from his library job), but in truth both are stuck: emotionally isolated, painfully aware of their loneliness and seemingly unable to do anything about it.  “I Refuse” is fragmented, impressionistic, darting between key episodes in Jim and Tommy’s youth, always returning to the day of their reunion in September 2006. This is not simply the story of two men. Tommy’s foster father, his runaway mother and his favorite sister also give their accounts. (The women’s sections are the least successful, and I would have liked to hear from Jim’s mother, strikingly absent from the narrative despite being the only parent to stay the course.)  Some chapters are written in the first person, some in the third. The same events are often described from different perspectives, which has a layering effect: One version casts light on another, so you become aware of the moments of stubbornness or confusion when people began to move apart. As all the voices are sad and flat, they can be hard to distinguish, yet there is a powerfully dense, intimate texture to these emotional landscapes as rendered by Petterson and his translator, Don Bartlett. Modest clauses are casually, informally linked with lavish successions of commas or “ands.” One plain thought runs into another: regrets, memories and fading hopes tacked together without fuss or ornamentation.  Jim and Tommy are not fanciful men. Their language is as cramped, as austere, as their psychology. Ice “looked as solid as it was.” The “leaves of the birch trees were green as the spruce trees were green.” Snowdrifts stand “as tall as a man.” I’m not entirely persuaded by an episode of drunkenness that “dissolved and drifted in between the trees like damp rags” (do damp rags drift?), but I accept that’s how they remember it.  The characters’ thoughts are often unconnected and digressive, and sometimes thoroughly drab, the oppressive accumulation of detail adding to the sense of everyday paralysis. Both men spend a great deal of time getting lost in shopping malls or driving aimlessly around the Oslo suburbs, pondering the best routes, and occasionally the narrative seems hijacked by the GPS. Here’s Tommy in his Mercedes: “I had passed the turnoff to Lillestrom, and the Skedsmo crossroads and Frogner, and kept up a steady hundred on the E6, you were allowed to now, the signs said 100 and then of course most people were doing 110 or more, that’s the way it always has been, I used to be one of them myself.”  Yet Petterson also transforms the unremarkable into magic. At one point the two boys, coming home from a party, dig a trench for fun: a strange moment of joyful intimacy also experienced by the reader. The friendship begins to fall apart on a frozen moonlit lake, but the episode itself is almost overshadowed by the hypnotic description of the boys putting on their skates beforehand.  Characters have dull thoughts, but they also have thoughts that are affecting and startling, revealing small details that illuminate the heart of the novel. Your patience is tested, then rewarded. This isn’t stream of consciousness so much as an international shipping lane of it, an immense, slow-churning current of interiority. It won’t be to all tastes, but it is a fine, defiant way of capturing character in its resolute peculiarity.  All of this unavoidably raises the specter of Karl Ove Knausgaard, another contemporary Norwegian novelist given to long bouts of interiority and nostalgia for boyhood friendships. But Petterson has a more traditional sense of pacing: That scene of putting on skates, which in Petterson takes up a leisurely 10 lines, might in Knausgaard have stretched to 10 pages, or 100. Petterson also retains more familiar elements of novelistic architecture. During the course of this single day, Jim and Tommy are both given a chance. One lets it pass; the other, suddenly alive to the possibilities, reaches out for it. Against all the odds, for one man at least — the man who glimpses what fate has in store for him and balks at it — there is hope. Refusal is not necessarily passive, Petterson suggests: It may well be the bravest, most assertive course of action.  282 pp. Graywolf Press. $25.  Harriet Lane is the author of two novels, “Her” and “Alys, Always.”  A version of this review appears in print on April 26, 2015, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘I Refuse’. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Per Petterson’s new novel is about lost parents and the unexpectedly divergent paths of childhood friends who meet again as adults.