Earnest literary convictions are like men’s hats: You can’t wear them in public, at least not without the right charisma. So learns Elias Rukla, a high school Norwegian teacher in Oslo. His hat is Ibsen, the quaintly powerful playwright of modern morals. Rukla teaches four Ibsen plays to his senior students, but they couldn’t care less.

Rukla believes teenage boredom has changed since he began teaching 25 years ago. He remembers being bored, in a sleepy way, in secondary school. But today’s teenagers are offended at being bored. “They quite simply felt victimized,” Rukla realizes, “and that was not to be disposed of lightly.”

Rukla is the hero of the aptly-titled “Shyness & Dignity” (Greywolf, 144 pages, $12), by Dag Solstad, the only writer who has won Norway’s literary critics’ prize three times.

Mr. Solstad’s short, discursive novel describes a nervous breakdown that has implications for an entire culture. Rukla, on a tear about a minor character from “The Wild Duck,” wonders whether his pupils appreciate the “good fortune, of observing, in close-up, a grown man struggle with the absolutely essential questions of our cultural legacy in an acceptable, though imperfect, way, making him stammer, perspire.” Of course they do not appreciate it. Rukla goes crazy with shame; he thrashes his umbrella against a drinking fountain, cursing and threatening the student onlookers. He then storms home, knowing that he has forfeit his career.

Rukla remembers his college years, when talk was wide and open. He wonders how he got from there to a life in which, he realizes, he no longer has anyone to talk to.

For even the faculty room is closed, effectively, to the humanities. Various authors are mentioned, as occupational jargon, but, “contrary to one’s expectations, it looked as if the teachers felt compelled to deny, at all costs, that they found themselves at this high cultural level.”They prefer instead to talk about their mortgages: better to be a poor working stiff than a snob.

“True, being enslaved by debt you were a loser, a not entirely successful person, but it linked you to social life as a completely modern individual.”

In other words, with their low salaries, none of the teachers feel they have any right to cultural authority.

Rukla’s conundrum transcends his profession: Can cultured people count on culture itself? Have they been orphaned? Or do they presume too much? Rukla, like Ibsen, has a social sensibility: He cannot just retreat into books. Being a teacher only formalizes his problem:

“An era had come to an end, and Elias Rukla as a socially conscious individual along with it, because he had, after all, put himself at the disposal of that very era, as a public educator.”

“Shyness & Dignity” begins as a farce but ends as a tragedy. Readers may want to read “The Wild Duck” before starting Mr. Solstad’s novel; not only is this Ibsen’s death centennial, but the novel contains many rich structural allusions to Ibsen’s play.

***

Jennifer Egan’s National Book Award-nominated second novel, “Look at Me,” told the story of a snooty model who, condescending to visit her hometown, gets her face disfigured in a karmic car crash. Ms. Egan’s third novel, “The Keep,” similarly, depends on hand-picked circumstances. Danny, a downtown promoter who physically can’t stand to be away from his cell phone and who has a sixth sense for WiFi access, visits his cousin, Howard, who is renovating a castle in Eastern Europe. The castle will be cell phonefree; Howard believes that people need to renew their imaginations, and that being bored in a creepy setting is the answer. For now, at least, Danny has his satellite phone — but whoops, he drops it in a pool of medieval muck.

To sharpen the conflict, Ms. Egan includes this backstory: When they were children, Danny once abandoned Howard, then a pudgy Dungeons & Dragons nerd, in an underground cave. In the present, when Danny and Howard become lost in the castle’s dungeon — no reception down there — Danny gets a chance to redeem himself.

After a few chapters, Ms. Egan discloses that this potboiler is actually a book within a book; it is the work of a convict who’s channeling his escapism into a writing class. His faux-naif style aspires to disarming self-consciousness: “Now wait a minute, someone’s got to be saying. Three pages ago Danny had been awake almost ten minutes, and now you’re telling us it’s forty-five?”

“The Keep” can be fun, and its Russian-doll treatment of claustrophobia gives the casual reader something to chew on. Ms. Egan has a fine eye for looks and voices, and keeps her tale moving with juicy cosmopolitan details — what does Burgundy from the abandoned cellar taste like; how do hipster boots fare on crenels and merlons?

blytal@nysun.com