November 5, 2020 53
Brooklyn who is also—and not, we dis-
cover, by coincidence—named Alma.
Each of these characters can be enjoy-
able company at times, but too often
they sink into stereotype, or even, in the
case of Leo, cloying ethnic caricature,
and the plot that braids their stories
is so unlikely, so full of clichés, so un-
necessarily convoluted, that the book’s
spell is repeatedly broken. Like its pre-
decessor, The History of Love traces
an arc from engaging to not quite sat-
isfying, lapsing into a largely predict-
able YA tale that struck several critics
as inauthentic and mawkish. And yet,
to echo Leo’s favorite expression, the
book made Krauss a best- selling liter-
ary star, delighting readers all over the
world, and remains the work for which
she is most known today.
If it was in the hopes of winning such
popular success that Krauss wrote the
kind of novel she did—the kind known
to appeal to that large crowd of read-
ers who love a good “colorful” ethnic
tearjerker and an innocent but smart
and spunky juvenile narrator—there
is evidence she may have had some
regrets. In Forest Dark (2017), a char-
acter named Nicole, like Krauss an in-
ternationally known Jewish- American
novelist from Brooklyn who, again like
Krauss, is the alienated wife of a man
who is also a writer and the father of
her two sons—says:
I wanted to write what I wanted to
write, however much it offended,
bored, challenged, or disappointed
people, and disliked the part of my-
self that wished to please. I’d tried
to rid myself of it, and on a certain
level had succeeded: my previous
novel had bored, challenged, and
disappointed an impressive number
of readers. But because the book,
like the ones before it, was still un-
deniably Jewish, filled with Jewish
characters and the echoes of two
thousand years of Jewish history,
I’d avoided sloughing off the pride
of my landsmen. If anything, I’d
managed to increase it, as part of
me must have secretly hoped to do.Going on to describe encounters with
some Israeli fans, she expresses noth-
ing but dismay at their overwrought
responses to a book that, though un-
named, is recognizably The History of
Love.
“Not a grown- up book for grown- up
readers.” I might have agreed with
James Wood’s verdict, but I closed The
History of Love wanting once again to
read more of Krauss. And indeed, to
read Great House (2010) after History
is to see a writer grow up.
Although it was a finalist for the
National Book Award, Great House
did not inspire the kind of ardent love
in readers as did The History of Love,
no doubt boring, challenging, or disap-
pointing many who had been hoping for
another book just like it. But, as noted by
an impressive number of critics, Great
House is by far the better novel, artisti-
cally and intellectually more ambitious,
emotionally deeper, and composed with
a much surer hand. Instead of a lost
manuscript, it is a piece of furniture
that connects this book’s several nar-
ratives: a gargantuan writing desk that
passes from the possession of one char-
acter to another. Structured as a series
of alternating confessional monologues,
the book is a puzzle that demands
some work to piece together along the
way—work that makes the experience
of reading only more engrossing.
It would not be inaccurate to call
Great House a collection of linked sto-
ries, with the most conspicuous link
being, of course, the physical object
of the desk. But there are thematic
and spiritual links as well. The stories
of these very different characters—
among them an American novelist
whose life is upended after the desk is
removed from her Manhattan apart-
ment, an elderly Londoner who dis-
covers a shocking secret from his late
wife’s past, a retired Israeli prosecutor
consumed by hostility toward his in-
scrutable estranged son, and a family
ruled by a daunting patriarch whose
passion is the recovery of Jewish be-
longings looted by Nazis—echo and
enhance one another in a sumptuously
textured plot moving among three con-
tinents and spanning many decades.
Together they form an anthology of
suffering: life- altering experiences of
loss and displacement, of heartbreak
and disillusionment and anguished
remembrance. They are about the ex-
istential anxieties common to modern
human experience in general and to
Holocaust- haunted Jewish experience
in particular. And they are about obli-
gation: to family, to community, to his-
tory, and to the dead—above all, to the
murdered dead.
In Forest Dark, there are two alter-
nating perspectives, one of which be-
longs to the autofictional Nicole and
the other to a rich and cultivated retired
attorney named Jules Epstein. Each of
these intense and incisively drawn char-
acters is a New Yorker who leaves home
for Israel, steered there by a dramatic
midlife crisis precipitated by a loss of
faith in what had once sustained them:
marriage, family, culture, work, and
high professional achievement. Each is
troubled by the sense of having lost his
or her way, of something missing from
a seemingly bright and enviable exis-
tence, something perceived to be essen-
tial to life’s meaning and true worth.
The same detailed development of
story and character that enriched Great
House can be found in Forest Dark, but
the latter contains more of what Javier
Marías has described as the once tra-
ditional but now uncommon practice
of literary thinking, the action of the
novel being periodically paused to ac-
commodate meditative digressions on
a range of subjects, from aspects of bib-
lical history to what it means to write
fiction to Freud’s theory of the uncanny
and the idea of the possible existence of
a multiverse.
Although the autobiographical ele-
ments of Nicole’s narrative have been
often noted, and Krauss herself has
expressed admiration for such writers
as W. G. Sebald, Karl Ove Knausgaard,
and Rachel Cusk, this should not over-
shadow what remarkable powers of
imagination went into the making of
Forest Dark. To take the most prom-
inent example, there is Krauss’s au-
dacious invention of a counterlife of
Franz Kafka, propounded by an enig-
matic Israeli academic whom Nicole
meets in Tel Aviv, and according to
which, instead of dying of tuberculosis
in an Austrian sanatorium in 1924, the
great writer contrived to fake his death
and escape his angst- filled European
existence to live out his days pseudony-
mously as a gardener in Palestine.It is anything but rare for a novelist to
begin a career with a highly promising
book that is followed by several weaker
ones. Krauss, on the other hand, has
been moving along the opposite path,
going from strength to strength and
producing, with Forest Dark, her most
accomplished novel yet.William Faulkner once mused that,
like the failed poet he confessed to be,
“maybe every novelist wants to write
poetry first, finds he can’t, and then
tries the short story, which is the most
demanding form after poetry. And,
failing at that, only then does he take
up novel writing.” And maybe not, but
anyone who has tried all three forms
knows just what Faulkner was getting
at. (It is perhaps worth mentioning that
Krauss, too, began her writing career as
a poet.) In “Only Collect,” Davies ob-
serves that, while many a contemporary
novel can be faulted for having a dis-
appointing ending yet still be judged a
fine work, the same could never be said
of a short story. Presumably George
Saunders also had this in mind when he
wrote, in an essay about story writing,
“The land of the short story is a brutal
land, a land very similar, in its strictness,
to the land of the joke.” It is a principle
of creative- writing teachers that, before
even attempting to write a novel, every
aspiring fiction writer should learn to
write a good short story. Sounds rea-
sonable. Except that, try as they might,
many novelists, including some very
successful ones, never do achieve this.
There are many pleasures to be had
from reading the stories in To B e a
Man, though I suspect the main effect
for many Krauss admirers will be im-
patience to get their hands on her next
full- length work. Written over the years
that produced the novels, the stories
reflect those books’ interests and fix-
ations, and the title story, whose main
character is the middle- aged mother of
two boys, a divorced Jewish- American
woman possessed of an astute intellect
and a pensive nature, seems a lot like
the Nicole section of Forest Dark.
It is impossible to read “Zusya on
the Roof,” about an elderly man named
Brodman who has a near- death expe-
rience that pitches him into psychic
upheaval, without feeling the presence
of The History of Love’s Leo. And in
Brodman’s tormented examination of
his long life of discontent, in particular
in regard to his Jewish heritage and the
way it has bound and burdened him—
“Who might he have been, had it been
given to him to choose? But his chance
had passed. He had allowed himself
to be crushed by duty. He had failed
to fully become himself, had instead
given in to ancient pressures”—we are
deep in Krauss territory.
That potent figure so familiar to us
from the novels—a difficult, egotistical
father—makes several appearances. In
“I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,”
an American woman obeys her late fa-
ther’s wish that she visit the Tel Aviv
apartment he has bequeathed her, a
place she had not even known existed.
She is staying there alone one night when
a stranger claiming to be her father’s
old friend lets himself in with a key. As
he makes himself at home, the baffled
woman wonders if perhaps her father had
arranged for him to be there, either “to
watch over me, or to pass something on
to me... some message or sign of what
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