In June 2010 The New Yorker named Nicole Krauss as one of the 20 under 40 writers worth watching, and alongside husband Jonathan Safran Foer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Philipp Meyer, Dinaw Mengestu and Joshua Ferris it was a formidable list of young talent (missing perhaps the excellent Miranda July, but that's just a personal gripe), and with her third novel, Great House, Krauss proves she more than deserves her place on the list.
Krauss's work is characterised by a kind of lightness and delicacy which, as Lavinia Greenlaw once said of Tim Cockburn's poetry, almost seems incidental; but with a certain probing the layers peel back revealing a fragile density to her work, depths all the more rich and appreciable for their subtlety, for the unsaid.
Great House certainly has the quirkiness of its postmodern counterparts, managing to play on the border between being clever and twee without veering too far into the saccharine – the huge desk possibly belonging to Lorca linking the stories being a good example – but this novel marks a real progression in her style too. This is a much more mature work than its tricksy (although wonderfully charming) predecessor The History of Love, there is a definite maturity here and a marked progression in Krauss's style and the concepts behind her work.
In Krauss's sparse, delicate prose the five narrators form a kind of dialogue between the characters and the novel's disparate fragments. Nadia's opening section takes the form of a monologue to a hospitalised judge (who may perhaps be a character from another section) about her writing, the desk and her relationships. The narration then shifts to a father's one-sided dialogue with his missing son, on their troubled lives together, his son's writing, and his father's grief. Then we have Arthur's evocation of life after his wife's death, reminiscing on their shared lives, sadnesses and the presence of the desk. Izzy then takes over with her tale of living with the affluent children of a furniture specialist, being in love with one of them, and their father rebuilding his own father's study. Finally George Weisz, the furniture specialist himself, takes the last section with a riddle and an explication of his life's project of the desk, memories and sadness. These characters pass in and out of the novel, often in reflection or absence in the tales of the others, and mark a shifting story of dialogue, wherein the links are often left unsaid, and the work's unity is no longer the focus.
In Krauss's sparse, delicate prose the five narrators form a kind of dialogue between the characters and the novel's disparate fragments. Nadia's opening section takes the form of a monologue to a hospitalised judge (who may perhaps be a character from another section) about her writing, the desk and her relationships. The narration then shifts to a father's one-sided dialogue with his missing son, on their troubled lives together, his son's writing, and his father's grief. Then we have Arthur's evocation of life after his wife's death, reminiscing on their shared lives, sadnesses and the presence of the desk. Izzy then takes over with her tale of living with the affluent children of a furniture specialist, being in love with one of them, and their father rebuilding his own father's study. Finally George Weisz, the furniture specialist himself, takes the last section with a riddle and an explication of his life's project of the desk, memories and sadness. These characters pass in and out of the novel, often in reflection or absence in the tales of the others, and mark a shifting story of dialogue, wherein the links are often left unsaid, and the work's unity is no longer the focus.
The novel feels like it's going nowhere, couched in a very deliberate, and attractive stasis, a willful uncertainty which resists the easy drive of a central thrust, affording the reader the space to simply experience the pleasure of the novel's multiple voices and to create their own patchwork between them. As Krauss herself notes in an interview for PBS she tried, with Great House, to write a novel 'without a centre'. The five narrators are loosely linked through the coexistence of the desk, their solitude and sadnesses and through the omnipresence of the desk, each voice and story becomes infused with the act of passing things on, what Krauss calls 'the burden of inheritance'. This familial burden is a familiar theme for Krauss readers – her subtle investigation into Jewish identity after the holocaust haunts the pages of The History of Love in its scrutiny of memory and Hirschian postmemory, and is used again here to great effect. In the novel's decentralisation, however, in its deliberate refusal of focus, the thrust of the post-holocaust experience is displaced allowing a pure, more delicate experience of identity and postmemory to manifest.
The passing on of furniture here metaphorically takes on the role of inherited memories, explicated most poignantly in George Weisz’s reconstruction of his deceased father’s study (alongside the other characters’ desperation for the same integral desk). As good as this is however the use of Freud’s reconstructed study feels a touch heavy-handed in a novel where everything else is weighted with such careful subtlety.
The passing on of furniture here metaphorically takes on the role of inherited memories, explicated most poignantly in George Weisz’s reconstruction of his deceased father’s study (alongside the other characters’ desperation for the same integral desk). As good as this is however the use of Freud’s reconstructed study feels a touch heavy-handed in a novel where everything else is weighted with such careful subtlety.
Great House is first and foremost a novel about its characters and their solitudes; the links between the stories take a major back-step – at times almost to the point of being unseen – alleviating the pressure novels of this quirky type typically exert on their characters. All too often novels like this take on an unmistakeable (and bizarrely praised) cleverer-than-thou voice sacrificing characters' believability and depth, bending them to the contrivances and excesses of this eccentric cleverness.
Like the novel itself the five narrators are decentered, and almost nameless (each one getting named no more than a handful of times); they are characters molded around internal absences and doubts – wholly formed and realised in their grief – lending the novel a touch of genuine sadness; as Arthur of the ‘Swimming Holes’ sections notes of his wife, 'suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the centre, the always moving centre of the woman I loved'.
Like the novel itself the five narrators are decentered, and almost nameless (each one getting named no more than a handful of times); they are characters molded around internal absences and doubts – wholly formed and realised in their grief – lending the novel a touch of genuine sadness; as Arthur of the ‘Swimming Holes’ sections notes of his wife, 'suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the centre, the always moving centre of the woman I loved'.
While The History of Love managed to be laugh-out-loud funny whilst probing into grief, Great House creates a far more genuine and mature pathos in its unwavering gaze – the characters' grievances are never sacrificed for quick laughs or knowing jokes and are instead allowed to exist in their pure, sad totalities. This is not to say the novel is a miserable affair (it really isn't), it manages a far more delicate construction than other novels of its type wherein sadnesses hang like shimmering tinsel across the fragile narration.
The reader is made to occupy a realm of uncertainty making leaps and decisions without knowledge or understanding, as they must in real life outside the text. There seems to be a play between various doubts in the novel, one can almost feel the doubts of the author in its loose construction playing against the novel's and characters' own doubts about themselves and also those of reader reconstructing this decentered and deconstructed novel. Here, in a strikingly subtle way, the novel achieves a kind of immediacy in its fragmentation and doubt, which can be seen behind many of the far flashier projects of Modernism.
Nicole Krauss
Another of the novel’s primary focuses is literature itself, whether it’s Dovik’s attempted short story of the shark and sadness, Nadia and Lotte’s published corpus or Yoav writing notes about Izzy’s body and their lovemaking, almost every character is concerned with writing, expression and a passing on of themselves through written language. Alongside this there’s the occasional self-reflexive postmodern nod to the linguistic building materials of the book itself, ‘I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semi-colon’; a technique so often overused, which here, in its scarcity, become a treat with every appearance.
Around these various absences and doubts, between the separate and solitary characters, their griefs, identities and necessary contrivances form the walls of Krauss's Great House, holding all the absences, repetitions and inheritances inside it. It is as Weisz notes of Jewish identity towards the novel's conclusion, ‘if every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up as one, the house would be built again...or rather a memory of the house so perfect it would be, in essence, the original itself’. Krauss's novel becomes this house, the walls around the obscurity, sadness and inherited memories of our identities.
With Great House Nicole Krauss has created a subtle, delicate novel marking a real development in her idiosyncratic style and finesse, that manages to both mature and stay close to the concepts and thrusts of her writing that made her previous work so enjoyable. Here Krauss clearly shows the accuracy of The New Yorker’s claims, begins to achieve the potential she illustrated in her earlier novels and shows she truly deserved her place as a finalist for the National Book Award.Pick up your copy here.