10 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020RALPH ELLISON SAIDthat “some people
are your relatives but others are your an-
cestors, and you choose the ones you want
to have as ancestors.” I returned to this
idea again and again while reading Nicole
Krauss’s superb new collection, “To Be a
Man.” In each of these moving stories, we
feel the weight not only of family, but of his-
tory and faith and leaving a legacy, press-
ing down on every one of her characters.Birth and death, joy and mourning, love
and heartbreak — these too animate the
collection. But as a writer Krauss is less in-
terested in describing life’s grand explo-
sions than she is in showing how people
make sense of the rubble.
“To Be a Man” is Krauss’s first story col-
lection, after the acclaimed novels “Man
Walks Into a Room,” “The History of
Love,” “Great House” and, most recently,
“Forest Dark.” Like those longer works,
these short fictions also explore the
themes of memory and spirituality and
transnational Jewishness. Her protago-
nists often live in limbo; as the narrator in
the story “Amour” puts it, Jewish homes
can be spaces “where being American was
an accident of history, English an accident
of history, nature an accident of history.”
Despite the common threads, Krauss still
somehow seems to have invented a new
form for each novel, each story — their
characters so fully realized that Krauss’s
deft authorial hand is rarely evident. Her
characters seem to dictate how their own
stories ought to be told.
Each story in “To Be a Man” is governed
by its own unique and intricate logic, yet
the stylistic differences are never gim-
micky. Rather, the structures are pos-
sessed of an effortless elasticity, expand-
ing and contracting to fit the stories these
characters are compelled to tell. Many of
the pieces, for example, barrel far beyond
where we expect them to end — past any
kind of resolution and into frightening and
surprising territory. In the opening story,
“Switzerland,” a 13-year-old boarding
school student learns her friend has had a
dangerous encounter with an older man.
The rendezvous and its fallout are fraught
and absorbing, but Krauss doesn’t stop at
their immediate impact. She leads us into
the present day, as the student, now our
adult narrator, observes the way men look
at her own young daughter. “She has a
proudness about her that refuses to growsmall,” she says, but “it’s her curiosity in
her own power, its reach and its limit, that
frightens me. Though maybe the truth is
that when I am not afraid for her, I envy
her.” And just like that, the narrator is con-
fronted with the terrifying difference be-
tween being someone’s daughter and
someone’s mother.
In the story “End Days,” a powerful mar-
vel of realism, another teenage girl grap-
ples with her parents’ shockingly amicable
divorce (“they were in agreement about no
longer needing to agree on how to live the
rest of their lives”) while spending a sum-
mer living alone amid California wildfires.
“Zusya on the Roof,” narrated in the same
Old World Yiddishkeit readers may recog-
nize from “The History of Love,” captures
a lifetime of pain and intergenerational
misunderstanding spackled over with an
old man’s brusque, grumpy outrage.
In “I Am Asleep but My Heart Is
Awake,” the American narrator’s father
has died, and a mysterious stranger makes
himself at home in the dead man’s Tel Aviv
apartment. Although we never find out
who this man is, how or why he has ap-
peared — or perhaps becausethese ques-
tions are never answered — we gradually
come to accept and even welcome the vis-
itor’s presence.
Krauss’s refusal to adhere to formal con-
ventions, in time frame or plot resolution,
for example, gives her stories a certain en-
ergy, consistently conjuring an aura of
both intimacy and vastness. The closer we
get to these individuals’ internal land-
scapes, the closer we come to perceivingthe global forces that inform them. So
many of these characters live with their
feet in the United States and their hearts in
Israel. As she writes in “The Husband,”
these are people whose “roots are sown in
two places and so can never grow deeply
enough in either.”
The ties that are strained here are not
just geographical or cultural, but personal.
Many of the women in this collection have
separated from their husbands, and
Krauss’s depictions of the nuances of sex
and love, intimacy and dependence, call to
mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their
psychological profundity, their intellectual
rigor. Pondering her parents’ divorce and
her grandmother’s “approaching death,”
one character wonders whether her
mother felt “time was running out for the
things she still wanted from life” — a senti-
ment that could be applied to almost ev-
eryone in this book (and perhaps some of
us reading it, too). An actress lives alone
with sons “who needed her for everything,
it seemed, just as the men in her life had
always needed her for everything.” An-
other woman describes feeling a “quiet eu-
phoria” wash over her upon realizing she
no longer requires the support of a man.
Krauss’s stories capture characters at mo-
ments in their lives when they’re hungry
for experience and open to possibilities,
and that openness extends to the stories
themselves: narratives too urgent and
alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolu-
tions or easy answers. As one character
tells us, “Order would be found only in the
world to come.” 0At Home and Abroad
Short stories that highlight their author’s interest in family and faith.
By MOLLY ANTOPOLTO BE A MAN
Stories
By Nicole Krauss
229 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.
$26.99.Nicole KraussPHOTOGRAPH BY GONI RISKINMOLLY ANTOPOLis the author of “The UnAmer-
icans.”NDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2008
Independent publishers and
authors of not-so-independent
means receive special
discounted advertising rates
every Sunday in The New York
Times Book Review.For more information,
please contact Mark Hiler
at (212) 556-8452.Reachaninfluentialaudience
forless.Fun
and Fast.
Together
at Last.
The New York Times’s
5x5 mini crosswords
are now available in
two pocket-sized
volumes.