After an early Marxist-Leninist phase, Dag Solstad, who is now in his late sixties, has emerged, according to his peers, as Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist. The author of nearly 30 books, including a series of five political and cultural commentaries on the football world cup from 1982 to 1998, Solstad is the only writer to have won the Norwegian Literary Critics' award three times.

When the Nobel prize committee last autumn accused American authors of being insular and knowing nothing about the world's other literatures, you suspect that Solstad was exactly the kind of writer they had in mind for those parochial Yanks to grapple with. So one approaches a book called Novel 11, Book 18 from such an eminent novelist with trepidation. However, it turns out that while he might be rubbish with titles, Solstad is a terrific writer.

The novel tells the story of 50-year-old Bjorn Hansen, who, 18 years earlier, left his wife and young son in Oslo and moved to the small town of Kongsberg to be with his mistress, Turid. He becomes the town treasurer and is active in the amateur dramatic society. There is something of Chekhov in Solstad's deft handling of the rivalries and passions of provincial life, while the flinty rigour with which he analyses the cooling of Bjorn's feelings towards Turid has the melancholy and mercilessness of Proust.

Taking part in a disastrous production of Ibsen's The Wild Duck precipitates an emotional crisis in Bjorn and he decides to leave Turid. Also, a nagging concern about his health leads him to a doctor to whom he confides, “What bothers me is that my life is so unimportant.” He worries that he finds himself in the town “by pure chance, it has never meant anything to me. It's also by pure chance that I'm the treasurer here”. To escape the clutches of life's apparent randomness, Bjorn enlists the help of the doctor in an outrageous plan. Before anything can happen, though, his 20-year-old son, Peter, unexpectedly turns up to live with him while attending Kongsberg university. The relationship is not at all what we - or indeed Bjorn - expect. In a few telling scenes, Solstad establishes Peter (with his just-too-loud voice) as a boring, slightly stupid prig. He tells his father how outraged he was on the train journey to Kongsberg to find a woman occupying his reserved seat. The guard refused to move her as the carriage was nearly empty, so Peter could easily sit elsewhere. Peter decided to stand by his reserved place to make his point. As his son remains friendless at university, Bjorn realises “there was something about his son that inspired dislike”. And worse, he understands why.

A few months later, Bjorn goes with a delegation of municipal civil servants to Vilnius. On his last night there, he enacts the outrageous plan he has devised. It would give too much away to reveal what he does, but it is joltingly shocking and will strike readers either as in keeping with the existential undercurrent that Solstad has kept flowing through the novel, or simply absurd. In the end, it probably is excessive, but is not enough to detract from the excellence of the first three-quarters of the book. Novel 11, Book 18 is only the second of Solstad's works to be translated into English. There should be more.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad, trans Sverre Lyngstad
Harvill Secker £15.99 pp224

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