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

“You know, I actually think about that an awful lot, like, what is our purpose in life? Why am I here? I always think about some little kid being like, ‘What’d you do with your life?’ And me being like, ‘Well, I sold a bunch of floors.’” These are the words of Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson, the young man who manufactures the widest, purest, most metaphorical pine floorboards on the planet. At least, that’s what Matthew Clark believes. Set mostly in rural Maine, Bjarki, Not Bjarki is an expansive book. It is a standard work of journalism, describing with nuance and humanity the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor. It is also a meditation on what it means to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America. And it is a ghost story about marriage. It is an inquiry into the limits of language and certainty, a rumination on North American colonization, masculinity, gift cards, crab rangoon, bald eagles, and wood, all of it told in an exciting, energized, and original prose. Bjarki turns out to be someone quite different from whom the author had hoped. A new pine floor buckles. A coyote is shot. A diamond is lost. How do we make sense of the world and of ourselves, especially when the floor beneath us is so unstable; when nothing is quite what we had hoped it would be?