Hats off to Philip Roth

Nicole Krauss’s fourth novel takes its title from a Longfellow translation of the opening lines to Dante’s Inferno, and a certain “Mezzo Cammin” mood hangs over much of this bitty and restless book. Forest Dark is about chaos and crisis, both creative and personal, whose unsettled nature is only partly explained by Krauss’s attempt to find, as one of her protagonists puts it, “a form that could contain the formless, so that it might be held close, as meaning is held close, and grappled with”.

This is one of a growing number of experimental, self-sabotaging, slightly talking-shoppish novels (see also: Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner) that owe a debt to the wandering philosophical fiction of W G Sebald; and like them, it has excellent moments without ever quite dispelling the impression

that when writers gaze for too long into the abyss of incoherence, it starts gazing into them as well.

Krauss’s novel has two protagonists, or three if you count Franz Kafka, who lurks in the background (as he does in much of Krauss’s earlier fiction). The first is Jules Epstein, a New York lawyer who develops an interest in Jewish mysticism and begins to disburden himself of his possessions. Eventually, with a copy of the Book of Psalms in his pocket, and dogged by a charismatic rabbi, he makes his way to Israel. His aim is to construct a memorial for his parents; instead, he disappears.

The second protagonist, whose reflections frame the novel, is “Nicole”, a well-known AmericanJewish novelist whose marriage is

disintegrating and whose next book is taking a long time to write (events mirrored in Krauss’s own life by the seven-year gestation period of this novel). For Nicole, as for Dante’s narrator, the direct road

Krauss chops her story into self-denying morsels

is certainly lost: she mistrusts narrative (“More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrote, the degree of artifice was greater than the degree of truth”); she mistrusts philosophy (“I hate Descartes”) and she mistrusts her