52 The New York Review
Disorders of the Heart
Sigrid Nunez
To Be a Man
by Nicole Krauss.
Harper, 229 pp., $26.99
In an essay about short story collec-
tions called “Only Collect,” Peter Ho
Davies discusses two different ways a
writer might put together such a book.
There is the way of Davies’s first book,
The Ugliest House in the World (1997),
“assembled under the not very edi-
fying organizing principle of ‘all the
good stuff I happen to have right now.’”
Although any group of stories by the
same author is sure to include similar-
ities, the stories in this type of collec-
tion are usually diverse, and when they
were written over a long period of time,
or when among the author’s intentions
was to experiment broadly or to show
imaginative and stylistic range, perhaps
even very much so. As Davies points
out, it is not uncommon for this kind
of assortment to be called “uneven,”
with reviewers unable to resist dividing
hits from misses—something perhaps
even more likely if the writer is one
whose literary reputation was made as
a novelist. (Reviewer A, on the debut
collection by a notable American nov-
elist: “Two or three are excellent; none
are total misses.” About the same book,
Reviewer B writes that, a month after
she first read them, two of the ten stories
have stayed with her in the way of great
fiction that “haunts the mind” and “lin-
gers in the reader beyond understand-
ing”—in her view, “a pretty good score
for any collection of short fiction.”)
Davies writes that for his next book,
Equal Love (2000), he
set out... to shape and define the
links between my stories, to write
essentially the second and more
interesting kind of collection, a
linked collection—in my case a
thematically linked collection con-
cerned with the various relations
between parents and children.Of course, there are many ways a group
of short stories might be linked, the
most obvious being the use of one or
more of the same characters, or charac-
ters whose lives are in one aspect or an-
other related. Famous early examples
are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio, published in 1919, and a book
that took inspiration from it, Heming-
way’s In Our Time, which came out
five years later. Other links might have
to do with pattern or structure (from
Joyce’s Dubliners, Davies took the idea
of having the ages of major characters
in Equal Love increase as the stories
progress), or with various echoes and
parallels, some planned and others of
which the writer might not have been
immediately aware.
Another kind of link Davies mentions
is ethnicity: the Dubliners of Joyce, the
Jewish- American characters in Philip
Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. More
recent examples are the Indians and
Indian- Americans who people Jhumpa
Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and
the African- American community of
Washington, D.C., in Edward P. Jones’s
Lost in the City. Noting how the stories
in such collections are often not only
about community but also about the
fragmenting of those communities, “a
whole that is also in parts,” Davies, a
British writer of Welsh and Chinese de-
scent, fancies the short story collection
as perhaps “an especially American
form, a reflection of the melting pot.”
Although the ten stories in Nicole
Krauss’s new book, To Be a Man, are
also about community—the same
(fragmented) Jewish community that
has been central to her earlier work—
the collection fits more neatly into
Davies’s first category than into his
second. Of the seven stories that were
published previously, one appeared in
2002, the same year as Krauss’s first
novel, Man Walks Into a Room, and
another this October, three years after
the publication of her fourth and most
recent novel, Forest Dark.
Davies is hardly alone in believing
that a mixed bag of stories is less inter-
esting than a linked collection. Book
publishers know only too well that short
fiction of any kind is a tough sell. This has
long been so. Writing in The New Yorker
in 1927, Dorothy Parker lamented how
the feeling of being “cheated” when
offered a book of stories had blinded
readers to the fact that Hemingway
the short story writer was greater than
Hemingway the novelist. It was the ec-
static reception of his debut novel, The
Sun Also Rises, that made him a liter-
ary lion; In Our Time, published about
a year earlier, “caused about as much
stir in literary circles as an incompleted
dogfight on upper Riverside Drive”:People take up a book of short sto-
ries and say, “Oh, what’s this? Just
a lot of those short things?” and
put it right down again. Only yes-
terday afternoon, at four o’clock
sharp, I saw and heard a woman
do that to Ernest Hemingway’s
new book, Men Without Women.
She had been one of those most
excited about his novel.
Literature, it appears, is here
measured by a yard- stick.I wonder what Parker made of
D.H. Lawrence’s review of In Our
Time, which asserted that it was not a
book of stories at all but “a fragmentary
novel.” In any case, in our time, and byany measure, it appears that the linked
collection has it all over the other kind.
Most desirable: a set of stories suffi-
ciently interrelated so that they can be
marketed as a novel. Novels- in- stories
like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the
Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s
Olive Kitteridge and its sequel, Olive,
Again, have won both critical praise
and a large readership.
I did not read the copy on the back
of the advance edition of To Be a Man
until I had read the book, and when I
did it surprised me. According to the
publisher, the stories explore “what
it means to be in a couple, and to be
a man and a woman in that perplex-
ing relationship.” It’s not that this isn’t
true; couples do appear in the stories,
though their relationships are, I would
say, complicated rather than perplex-
ing, as most relationships between men
and women are. But it hadn’t occurred
to me that this was what the book was
“about.” In other descriptive copy I’ve
seen, “in that perplexing relationship”
has been inflated to “and the arising
tensions that have existed in all rela-
tionships from the very beginning of
time,” and the stories are said to “mir-
ror one another and resonate” in such
a way “that the book almost feels like
a novel.” This I did find perplexing.
Also telling. Note the punch- pulling
“almost.” Certain mirrorings and reso-
nances notwithstanding, the book does
not feel at all like a novel. Here is fear
of the yardstick striking again.
Man Walks Into a Room, about a
young college professor who suffers a
brain tumor that leaves him unable to
remember anything about his life past
the age of twelve, introduced Krauss as
a novelist of ample intelligence, imagi-
nation, and ambition. The book takes
on serious questions about the role of
memory in the creation of a person’s
identity and what it might mean to be
forced to begin a second life after such
a devastating loss of self. As intrigu-
ingly as the man’s story begins, though,
it seemed to me that Krauss proceeded
to paint herself into a corner. The only
important relationship in his life is with
his wife—the person who, besides him-
self, is most affected by his catastrophe
and whom amnesia has transformedinto a complete stranger to him—but
that relationship is allowed to dissolve
before the book is halfway through. A
scientific experiment for which the man
volunteers dominates the remainder of
the narrative and twists it into some-
thing like science fiction.
As events grow in improbability, you
can sense the writer groping rather than
aiming toward a conclusion. The book
ends up feeling more like a case study
than like a fully realized novel—the
story of a condition, albeit a dramatic
one, but not persuasively that of a real
human being. I thought the novel could
have benefited from an additional per-
spective, that of the wife being the most
promising possibility, but by the time we
do hear from her it’s too little too late
and more jarring than enlightening.
This was one of those reading experi-
ences when I found myself admiring the
writing without being much stirred by it.
But that admiration was keen enough to
make me want to read more of Krauss.
Krauss’s second novel, The History of
Love (20 05), reveals, to an even greater
degree than her first, a fertile imagina-
tion and an abundance of sharp literary
skills. And here (as also, it will turn out,
in each of her following novels) Krauss
does use the device of alternate voices
in the way I thought her previous novel
cried out for. One narrative belongs to
Leo, an elderly Polish Holocaust survi-
vor living a lonely retiree’s life in Man-
hattan, a former locksmith who also
happens to be the unrecognized au-
thor of a great novel, composed in his
youth but lost for decades, called The
History of Love. Written originally in
Yiddish, Leo’s novel tells the true story
of the love of his life, his young sweet-
heart Alma, who escaped from Poland
to America several years before Leo
himself arrived only to learn that she
had married another man. It is also re-
vealed that when Alma and Leo parted
she had been pregnant with their child,
a son, who has grown up to be a distin-
guished Jewish- American novelist.
The long, tangled saga of Leo’s man-
uscript is key to Krauss’s plot and of
fanatical significance to the narrator
of the book’s parallel story, a bright,
resourceful, and immensely likable
fourteen- year- old Jewish girl fromNicole Krauss; illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck