Great House by Nicole Krauss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to Extract Empathy

Krauss is a mistress of extracted empathy. She can drag it out of you even when you fight it, particularly empathy for writers: for Nadia, a writer prevented by success from writing what she ought; for Dov, an Israeli, prevented by apparent paternal sadism from becoming a writer at all; for Lotte, an Holocaust-traumatised emigre writer, who reportedly goes skinny dipping every day on Hampstead Heath; for Isabel, a failed Oxford student (presumably a writer, if only of essays), who makes some bizarre personal decisions. Their stories touch each other just enough to amplify the empathy one feels for each.

It intrigues me how she does this. The fundamental theme is one of alienation - from loved ones, from family, from the world, from oneself - as described by four narrators. But the variations on this theme overlay each other to absorb the reader into the desperation of each. How are they connected? Are the stories about the teller or the one told about? Is the central theme the awkwardness of living with authors, even with oneself as an author? Or is the real story that of people coping with emotions buried so deeply that they can only be alluded to and discovered in a sort of psychoanalytic process carried out in print?

The literary devices in Great House are as complex as the variations on the basic theme. The thin thread of a piece of furniture is used to keep the parts together. But there are numerous recurring tropes: The collapse and inversion of time over decades; the random interjection of discontinuous events; the phrase “after what happened” without explanation, used unexpectedly to queue up a later revelation; narrative characters (and narrators) left unidentified for extended periods; the teasingly repeated denial of expected resolutions; open family secrets never discussed; the homecoming after years of absence; and withal the withholding of any suggestion of purpose until the end. The effect is one of not just suspense but an experience of a pressing need to know how the characters survive, if indeed they do.

So, a complex, challenging and rewarding work by a pro. Can’t ask for much more.

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