Nicole Krauss's new novel is a smart and serious meditation on loss and memory. By Patrick Ness
It is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn't mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful). There's an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck. 'Twas ever thus, though the internet has upped the ease of sniping. There are, of course, smart and passionate sites out there by booklovers of all stripes, but there's also that strangely hostile army of folks who seem to wake up every morning with no other aim than to tell you, as loudly as possible, how much they hate everything you've ever loved, especially if it's written by someone who, to take a random example, is young, beautiful and married to a famous novelist.
I'm reminded of EM Forster's quote about happiness. Do we find it so often that we "turn it off the box when it happens to sit there"? Are good books likewise so common that we can afford to dismiss them if their writers aren't at least polite enough to be older than we are? If the book is good, so what? Krauss's last novel, The History of Love, was very good indeed. Great House, its serious, downbeat follow-up, is even better. And that, really, should be the end of the discussion.
Great House centres on a massive writer's desk. Filled with 19 awkwardly shaped drawers, one of which is never unlocked, it is "an enormous, foreboding thing that bore down on the occupants of a room". The desk has come to be vitally important, if sometimes obliquely, to four different characters, who each tell their stories in portmanteau style. Nadia is a middlingly successful novelist in her 50s, difficult and introverted, who was given the desk in 1972 by Daniel Varsky, a Chilean friend of a friend. She meets him only once, but they bond over shared tastes in poetry ? "Why is it that wherever a Chilean goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been there and set up a monopoly?" ? and he leaves her his furniture, including the desk, to look after while he makes a brief trip back to Chile.
He never returns. He is arrested by Pinochet's police, tortured and then murdered. Nadia continues to write at his desk for years, haunted by his memory, turning out several novels and losing a marriage along the way. One day, she receives a call from Leah Weisz, who says she's Daniel's daughter and inquires after the desk. For reasons unknown even to herself, Nadia gives the desk away with barely a second thought ? perhaps only "because saying yes felt inevitable" ? and almost immediately her life falls apart.
The narration is then taken over by Aaron, an elderly Israeli lawyer who's just lost his wife. He rages against nearly everything, but particularly against his younger son Dov, who fled Israel and became a respected judge in the UK. But Dov has now resigned his job and returned home, though he is seemingly incapable of saying why. Aaron is incensed by Dov's silence. "Try to understand it," he says to his son. "All your life, your pain infuriated me."
Aaron's fury, in fact, is so bristling and alive that it threatens to overbalance the novel. The other narrators tend to be tonally similar ? withdrawn, calm, searching ? so that Aaron's sections threaten to overshadow them, especially when, feeling his advancing age, he makes one final attempt to understand his unknowable son.
Two other strands make up the rest of the novel. Izzy, a faltering American student at Oxford, tells the story of Leah Weisz and her brother Yoav, with whom Izzy is in love. The Weiszes are dominated by their strict father, a man who specialises in tracking down furniture confiscated from Jews during the second world war. The desk becomes a pawn in the struggle between father and daughter. And finally, another elderly man whose wife has died ? Great House is full of such doublings ? tries to find out how his wife ended up with the desk in 1948 and why she gave it to Daniel Varsky two decades later.
The plotting here is subtle and fractured, almost demanding a second reading to put all the pieces together. Mainly, though, Great House is a meditation on loss and memory and how they construct our lives. It takes its title from a talmudic idea of Jerusalem after the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, a "great house" that was burned. Now, a character tells us, "every Jewish soul" is built around the memory of it, "so vast that we can, each one of us, only recall the tiniest fragment" but together it can be made whole again, every fragment remembered.
There are some imperfections ? the unbalancing strength of Aaron's voice, for one ? but these are overcome by restrained and powerful writing. There is a heartbreaking small scene, for example, where Izzy happens upon her mother, a clever woman whose upbringing didn't allow her to go to college, secretly reading Izzy's college course lists, her "lips moving soundlessly".
Great House is a smart, serious, sharply written novel of great care and yearning. And it is so not despite or even because of Nicole Krauss's non-literary blessings, but because, simply, she can write. That fact will be irritating to some, but can't we just be happy about the appearance of a good book and try to resist the temptation to turn it off the box?
Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy is published by Walker.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/19/great-house-nicole-krauss-review
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