When I reach for literature in translation, I’m hoping to learn something about another culture, gain a new perspective. So, when I cracked open Lina Wolff’s The Polyglot Lovers, I prickled against how much American culture was front and center, with an epigraph from Stephen King, a narrator, Ellinor, who is part of a fight club inspired by Fight Club, and her boyfriend named “Johnny.” There’s a terse animosity between Ellinor and Johnny that reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. And their sexual routine — Johnny staring at Ellinor while she lies naked on the bed, legs spread — reminded me of the much-mocked scene in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am, in which a wife asks her husband to fulfill a fantasy of being stared at like that until she orgasms.

But Ellinor doesn’t ask for this, Johnny does. And when Ellinor questions why he must stare at her, he replies, “Think about the actors in porn. They’ve got no problem showing themselves off.” In reply, she reminds him of the time she broke his nose.

It’s a satisfying riposte, but I wondered if we were supposed to admire the book for Ellinor’s lean-in to violent masculinity. I reflected on Claire Vaye Watkin’s declaration that her lauded first book Battleborn pandered to the male literary establishment (“Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner! ”), and that she wrote Gold Flame Citrus to center a feminine voice, something vulnerable, even if that meant the dominant culture would dismiss the book as “dumb and delicate and boring and frippery and for girls.”

I wondered if both the violent masculinity and the Americanness seeped into the writing of The Polyglot Lovers in the same way that it did for Watkins in Battleborn, when she imagined writing for a certain kind of reader.

The promise of a “shocking conclusion” in the marketing copy on Wolff’s book also made me consider who the publisher might be pandering to. Surely not men, a marketer might assume, who could not be expected to pick up a purple book with a romantic-sounding title in elegant art deco lettering?

Johnny dumps Ellinor when she gains weight, and she comes to the opposite conclusion of that well-worn advice that no boyfriend is better than a bad boyfriend: “What’s important is not being alone.” This is where I got interested in what Wolff is up to. Ellinor embarks on online dating, receiving offers of “financial freedom,” pleas from young men to be “educated,” veiled threats about the danger of internet dating, pictures of sailboats, pictures of dicks.

Ellinor is from a “swampy” Swedish backwater. Her next boyfriend, Bjerre, lives in Copenhagen. She muses, “I wondered why Bjerre was looking for a partner in Sweden. I thought there might be something about him that Danes saw at once, but that he hoped Swedes wouldn’t figure out. Danes think Swedes are dumb.” The literary tourist in me sat up. Now departing American culture. Next stop: thoughts on region-specific Scandinavian stereotyping.

The blurbs on the book laud Wolff as a feminist (her prior book is titled Bret Easton Ellis and Other Dogs) whose new book “burns down the pretensions of the male literary establishment.” I kept a lookout for whether The Polyglot Lovers would pass the Bechdel test (i.e., contains a scene in which at least two women speak of something other than a man). It does not. But is that by design? The closest we get is in Bjerre’s apartment building. Ellinor is alone and a female neighbor frantically asks for Ellinor’s assistance: her daughter is locked in the bathroom. Ellinor manages to get the daughter out, and her mother celebrates the fact that they didn’t need a man. But in kicking down the door, Ellinor had imagined Bjerre’s face beneath her foot.

It’s time to leave him, she decides.

Ellinor’s next liaison takes her to Stockholm: “people look hard-set and perfect, a little like they’d been cloned from a film”; her backwater village would be preferable, or Copenhagen, which smells of “urine, smoke, and waffles.” Ellinor’s take on Stockholm also recalls the performative progressivism of Seattle: “There’s this thing about Stockholmers that bothers me: they don’t like us. They think we’re just hicks and racists. And maybe we are hicks and racists, but not as hick and racist as they are.”

The man Ellinor meets, who is overweight, unwashed, and drunk, turns out to be a literary critic named Ruben. They go back to his place far out of the city, by a spruce forest and the sea. He lays out a pelt by the fireplace and tells her to undress and lie down. She asks: “Do you think I’m a whore?” He says: “I'm not a foreplay man.” But then he breaks down and confesses he has only been able to get sex by paying for it in the last few years.

Ruben also confesses he’s lost interest in the one author he’s followed for much of his career but has made an exciting new discovery. He shows Ellinor a manuscript — the only existing copy — entrusted to him by an author he met at a party, who we later learn is Max Lamas, the narrator of the second act of the novel. The excerpt she reads compares male madness to female madness, the capacity of women to suffer, women’s language, hysterical language, neurotic language: “Hysteria and intuition, the backwoods of women!” Ruben cannot go on reading the manuscript because…he thinks it is too good. Ellinor thinks it’s repulsive and changes the subject.

Their sexual encounter begins with violence: “I remember having enough time to think that he looked like a walrus about to maul another walrus.” And, “I’m not about to say he raped me, because I’m not the kind of person who gets raped” [emphasis mine]. Later, Ruben apologetically tweezes glass out of Ellinor’s body. After they eat, and while he snoozes, she returns to his office and burns the manuscript — also titled The Polyglot Lovers.

Even Steven? Ellinor ends up living with Ruben for weeks and discovers his hidden library, which contains every book by Michel Houellebecq, in French and Swedish. We have moved on from American influence to France’s infamous cultural export. (You may know Houellebecq from such headlines as “Am I an Islamaphobe? Probably.”) Ellinor reads Houellebecq’s work and watches YouTube interviews with him while Ruben is away at work. She comes to the conclusion that “The biggest problem with Houellebecq is not that he’s a creep, but that he’s an interesting creep.” Indeed. If he were merely a boring creep, if he didn’t frame himself as an enfant terrible who says outrageously what “everyone is thinking,” how would his ideas spread?

The opening to Max Lamas’s section of the story is beautiful yet disgusting, parallel to Ellinor's remarks on the problem of the interesting creep. He reflects on all the women he’s had, who he doesn’t remember individually, but as “those seaweed forests that spring up from the bottom of the sea in warm waters, the ones the Spanish call poseidonias.” His ideal woman “spoke a language I didn’t understand, rendering any communication impossible. It gave me the deepest sense of calm. If she was sad, I wouldn’t be able to console her.” Or “a very young polyglot lover with enormous, white milk-scented breasts, someone you could speak to in each language simultaneously…[who] would switch between a high-end French prostitute and a maternal Mexican.” Wolff has fun with Lamas’s preposterous pretensions. And, knowing Max narrates no more than a third of the book, I did too.

In search of inspiration, Max wanders Stockholm and follows some young, attractive women into a building called the World Trade Center. There, he meets a receptionist who is not young. He theorizes: “Perhaps she can speak Chinese or something else invaluable?” He assesses the grooves in her face, the dryness in her cleavage, and right away knows he will crush her. She opens up to him quickly and he is unbelievably cruel. Will this poor woman commit suicide because of this asshole, I worried? But then things get thrillingly weird — surreal images of a man’s head in formaldehyde and a worm eating his brain — and, at him, she roars a curse.

The story cuts to the decadence and decay of a ruined aristocratic family in Rome, narrated by Lucrezia, the granddaughter of “the notorious Marchese Mathilde Lantini.” This cut from one narrator to the next, as with the transition from Ellinor to Max, recalled for me the purposeful frustration in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, in which alternating chapters seduce readers into getting comfortable with a good story, then abruptly cut them off. What a tease! Would this be another case of literary blueballs? With all the prior literary references, I wondered if Calvino was hanging around in the shadows of this book, along with Borges, who is mentioned in Lucrezia’s section, and Elena Ferrante, who is not.

Lucrezia visits her family palazzo, which had been sold to a hotel. She notes:

It was far too painful, in spite of the early hour, throngs of garishly-dressed Americans were going in and out of the door, like a bubble gum in and out of a mouth. The smell of the house, which had always been a mix of age, mold, and damp marble, which in a way is also the smell of us — has been replaced by a sharp chlorinated smell.

When Max Lamas arrives at the family’s country home, to write a feature on the “last true marchesa in Italy” for La Stampa, a conservative paper, he shows up with a surprise in the form of Marco Devoti, his assistant, a young man who sneers at the aristocracy, calls Lucrezia, who is about his age, "slime" — and propositions her. Will there be no hot sex in a novel ostensibly about lovers, I wondered? Alas. “Puta puta puta, te voy a partir en dos,” he spits at Lucrezia, a sentence which anyone can understand, he says, “because it belonged to a filthy ur-language of sexuality.”

I wish Lucrezia’s section were a sprawling novel on its own. I wanted to spend more time with her, and with her ferocious mother Claudia and her frightening grandmother the Marchesa. I wanted to spend more time in the backstory of Lucrezia’s mathematician father and his humble upbringing south of Rome. In the sprawl, I wanted…a Ferrante novel?

But Lucrezia’s section isn’t sprawling, and I wasn’t able to care about this Devoti, or the emotional wound he inflicts upon Lucrezia. Would I care if there had been more to this brief liaison or its aftermath? There’s an interesting mix of disdain to explore here — class anger and anger at women in a position of power, even if their power is inherited and about to run out with the family fortune.

It’s a shame that in the end, we’re left with Lucrezia and the impression Devoti leaves on her, even if the whole point of the novel is to grapple with the male gaze. It’s a bit dispiriting because there’s also fabulous surprise in Lucrezia’s section; the marketing adjective in the novel’s flap copy of a “shocking” conclusion misses the mark. It wasn’t shocking, but it made me stand up gleefully and cheer.

Obviously, I can’t tell you what happens. It’s not that the novel smashes the patriarchy into something unrecognizable and new. It doesn’t go that far, and that doesn’t appear to be Wolff’s goal. But it was an outrageously funny and welcome moment, just the right thing to do to Lamas — even if it’s unclear how much he learned, how much will really change. In the end, there is more work to do.