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.