“Great House” by Nicole Krauss, $24.95
Maybe it’s because I am a father, but to me the most resonant sections of Nicole Krauss’ widely anticipated third novel, “Great House,” are those narrated by Aaron, an aging Israeli who still hasn’t figured out how to relate to one of his adult sons.
Aaron is bitter, loving, angry, complicated, “full of passionate intensity,” to borrow a line from Yeats. He is, in other words, a real person, marked by pride, regret and secret longings, which make him the most three-dimensional presence in the book.
The two chapters he narrates pulse with his hot-blooded heartbeat; the drama of his family rises to the level of the epic because he makes it so. As for the rest of the novel, it’s well done enough, nicely written and full of cogent insights, but compared with Aaron, it feels as if it’s taking place behind a sheet of glass.
That’s unfortunate, for “Great House” — much like Krauss’ exquisite and widely acclaimed “The History of Love” before it — is an exercise in kaleidoscopic storytelling, a novel that seeks to weave four groups of characters into a larger meditation on memory and loss.
There is Nadia, a middle-aged novelist transfigured by a youthful interaction with a martyred Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky; for a quarter century, she has written at his desk.
Paralleling her experience is Lotte Berg, a generation older and herself the author of elliptical short stories, who also worked at the desk for many years. For Leah and Yoav Weisz, children of an Israeli furniture dealer who specializes in heirlooms pillaged by the Nazis, the desk offers a different reference point, becoming a talisman in both their ongoing struggle with their father and his inability to come to terms with history.
Only Aaron — who, after the death of his wife, is brought back in contact with his long-estranged son, Dov — does not have anything to do with the desk.
There’s a lot to be said for using a piece of furniture to evoke the inner life of not just characters but also families, not least because it allows the novel to exist, a bit, outside of time. “Unlike people,” Krauss writes, “… the inanimate doesn’t simply disappear,” and as “Great House” progresses, she establishes the desk as a trace or imago, an echo of the past that reverberates into the present day.
And yet, for all the import of this object, it never really sticks to anyone. To be fair, this is part of the narrative momentum of the novel, to shift the desk from one character to another, so it will take on the necessary psychic weight.
Still, the ease with which it moves among them only undermines its metaphoric power, reminding us that, whatever it may stir in us, the inanimate remains inanimate, which means, on the most fundamental level, it can never be enough.
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