Review: Great House

This being the first time that I have encountered Nicole Krauss I was somewhat ignorant to the labels that follow her around. Being beautiful and young with a previous international bestseller (The History of Love) translated into thirty-five languages, Krauss is understandably rather popular with reviewers and readers. Fortunately though, in her newest novel, Great House, there is some evidence that this rise to popularity is not simply a consequence of good fortune but is also attributable to a delicate, if not frequently sombre, understanding of human nature.

Great House revolves, sometimes obliquely, around a nineteen drawer, heavy and imposing desk. Each of the separate characters deliver a narrative strain which in some way interweaves with the furniture and the other characters. The novel opens with Nadia, an ageing and tepidly successful writer who is negotiating the fallout of two failed marriages and contending, of course, with the desk which has haunted her living space, along with the figure of Chilean poet Daniel Varsky who gave it to her, numerous years before it was callously plucked away by Leah Weisz who claims to be Daniel’s daughter.

Later, we learn that Daniel was not the first to own the desk; some years before it belonged to Lotte, the impossibly difficult silent wife of Arthur Bender (an impossibly difficult silent husband). Then the desk is chased by the Weisz family for whom it means a lot, particularly the father, something we learn vicariously through the springy narrative of Oxford student Izzy. Along the way we are introduced to a host of other inaccessible and shady characters who become the novel’s chamber of echoes from which we gain only a fraction of what is originally said. For each individual the desk represents something different whether it is an emblem for a lost love, a representation of the distant past or a stoic and menacing challenge to one’s conjugal bliss. None of the options are particularly chipper.

Between the characters there is a complex movement of the narrative (and, of course, the desk) which, on trying to draw out the movements after reading the novel, left me with something looking like a family tree of which the end result could only be criminal proceedings. That, however, may just be my poor drawing because as the novel develops the undulating voices and brief interactions between narrative strands do make for a cohesive piece that moves from a claustrophobic inertia into an isolating and lonely breadth; an aspect reflected in the fluctuations between the locations of Israel, London, Oxford and New York.

Occasionally, the relationships of Krauss’ characters, while being invariably painfully strained, can hit the unpalatable notes of cliché andf fall in to the disappointing convolutions of self-deprecating angst. Nevertheless there are passages in which Krauss sheds this surface approach and the complications of partnerships, particularly the relationship of Lotte and Arthur, resonate poignantly with a sombre attitude that typifies the novel.

What the novel very effectively explores in depth is the tendency of individuals to wrap their lives around circumstances and relationships with a reluctance or inability to question the foundations. Consequently, each character is condemned to bear the burden of their past which predominantly exposes itself as the burden of some indecision or, more commonly, a form of cowardice or misunderstanding that forced upon them a lack of engagement with those they loved but felt destined never to understand.

Through it all the tone of these revelations are unsurprisingly and immutably solemn; something compounded by the unfortunate similarity in narrative voices made all the more obvious by the unconvincing dialogue which, whether it belongs to an Israeli student or a Liverpudlian housewife, has an unwavering and obtuse poeticism. Snippets of undeniable triumph do shine through though; there are occasional bursts of subtle epiphany that are delivered shrouded in bathos as a bitter stirring of consciousness and resonate as evidence of Krauss’ delicate and refreshing perception.

Great House is a novel of gaps and exile from one’s situation. It is a novel of fractures in which each character finds themselves evaluating a new perspective from a twilight that, for some, is an intermediary but for others such as Nadia, Arthur and Weisz, with whom the novel ends, it is a dwindling endgame from which the colour is draining.

Humour and action are certainly not buzzwords of this novel; the characters are too introspective without much focus beyond their immediate familial and social surroundings, but it is delicately wrought and offers lucid turns of phrase that will profit a reader inclined to explore it with a similar sensitivity.

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