Great Krauss

Nicole Krauss’s third novel, the artlessly lovely Great House, is made up of four stories, a structure—narratives on an apparently inevitable trajectory toward each other—that will be immediately familiar to readers of Krauss’s best-selling History of Love, the book that established her as a talent-to-watch, the latest Big Brooklyn Writer. Her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer, another Big Brooklyn Writer, one also fond of suddenly meaningful details, and the near-simultaneous appearance of History and Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (a work reviewed in this paper’s pages under the title “Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False”) surely contributed to Krauss’s literary star-quality, but the tendency to lump her with Foer does her a great disservice. Though the two share a home (an apparently impressive Park Slope brownstone) and more than a few thematic concerns (enough anyhow to inspire suggestions of obvious collaboration), their sensibilities are quite disparate. Krauss skirts sentimentality—though she is not above an occasional flirting with it—smartly negotiating the narrow territory between postmodern conceit and unbearable preciousness: she may appreciate useful coincidence as much as the next writing Brooklynite, but her coincidences are never twee. And that is, in this day and age, no faint praise. (One imagines that Krauss must be, at this point, rather over the interest generated by her domestic arrangements, and yet one of the most immediately apparent refrains in Great House is the difficulty of living with a writer and her incessant self-absorption, her insatiable demand for solitude, her appetite for other people’s miseries.)

The four stories of Great House are ostensibly connected by a colossal writing desk that, directly and indirectly, contorts and distorts the lives of those who do the storytelling. The desk—described by one narrator as “something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to be inanimate but, like a Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest them via one of its many little terrible drawers”—contains within itself a whole mythology of enigmatic possibilities, of cryptic provenances (it is said to have perhaps belonged to Lorca), a whole Russian-doll’s worth of histories (it is, at various points, plundered by the Nazis and recovered under false pretenses, given as a token of love, and used to assuage a mysterious guilt). At once totem and taboo, this sturdy, material artifact grounds the otherwise ephemeral, serving as ballast, an anchor in the stormy seas of Diaspora life in the second half of the twentieth century. As one character explains it, the Jews, having been exiled from Jerusalem and the ruined Temple, have had to turn Jerusalem and the Temple into an idea, to bend themselves around the shape of what they lost, to accommodate the absent form. Two thousand years later, “every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned in that fire…We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only knew existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door.”

This is to say that Great House is, above all, a novel of ideas, sometimes fully articulated, sometimes only impressionistically conveyed, touching on memory and loss and the struggle to assimilate the knowledge of how little we may know of those we love the most. And it is to say that, for a novel that tells so many stories, Great House is finally scant on plot, its action mostly confined to the unspooling of barely suppressed longings and doubts, the quiet personal reckoning that is, in Krauss’s artistic vision, the real story of most lives. I do not mean to suggest that nothing happens in the course of the novel—in fact, quite a bit does—but rather that the pleasure of reading this book is in its details, its intimation of sincerity, its quiet wisdom. There is a beautiful sort of logic to the way its pattern unfolds—like a song, heard for the first time and yet strangely familiar, as if, making such intuitive sense, it must have always already existed. (Still, it must be noted that, while the stories converge meaningfully, in subtle and sometimes surprising ways, some aspects of that desk’s history are probably best accepted without too much rigorous inquiry.)

If there is another novel Great House finally resembles, it may well be The Counterlife, Philip Roth’s great exploration of the myths and anti-myths we rehearse incessantly. Like The Counterlife, Great House travels from New York to London to Jerusalem, and like The Counterlife, it refuses easy resolutions; its stories intersect but do not necessarily add up neatly. Krauss may not yet be Roth at the height of his powers, but her latest suggests her as Roth’s most likely literary heir. With Great House, anyhow, Krauss has made an undeniable bid for literary greatness.