Desert solitaire
Nicole Krauss writes novels the way James Wood writes critical essays: They are cerebral and contemplative, intimately engaged in a dialogue with literary predecessors. But her books aren’t merely brainy. This author is incapable of writing a sentence that does not seem chiseled to perfection.
Krauss’ previous novel, “Great House,” followed four disparate characters thousands of miles apart, apparently linked by a huge, mysterious writing desk that’s gone missing. Though some reviewers found the links between these people so enigmatic as to make for an unsatisfying whole, the judges for the National Book Award were impressed. They named it a finalist for the prize.
My favorite among her oeuvre is “The History of Love,” which tracked an elderly Holocaust survivor in New York City and an adolescent girl in the city intrigued by a surrealistic novel also titled “The History of Love,” which she’s always heard about but can’t find. These parallel narratives ultimately intersect. The book’s brooding melancholy is leavened by a tart sense of humor, producing a bittersweet apprehension of life’s unruly complexity.
In Krauss’ triumphant new novel, “Forest Dark,” she reprises the themes of loss and quest, and continues the structure of dual protagonists whose trajectories may eventually align. Sixty-eight-year-old Jules Epstein is a hugely successful New York lawyer with a Fifth Avenue apartment that
showcases priceless paintings. He shares center stage, in alternating chapters, with a middle-aged Brooklynite, a writer named simply Nicole who is “between books.”
Both end up in Israel, where they have deep ties, and both are lost. As they’ve lost objects and loves, certainty has vanished and meaning itself has proved elusive. Both attract local would-be gurus, who claim to want to help. Nicole, whose literary novels resonate with Jewish themes, is naturally reflective. Jules, not so much.
Krauss portrays Jules as a larger-than-life character in the Saul Bellow mold: “There was too much of him; he constantly overspilled himself. It all came pouring out: the passion, the anger, the enthusiasm, the contempt for people and the compassion for all mankind . ... Argument was the medium in which he was raised, and he needed it to know he was alive.”
Now he’s not only divorced his wife of many years but is shedding everything he owns. Influenced by a book on mysticism pressed on him by his daughter Maya, he’s set loose from the old moorings, and strangely possessed by a newfound sense of the infinite, of realities beyond the everyday.
What Jules feels intuitively, and despite all his past history, Nicole puzzles over endlessly, as though working a Rubik’s cube. Fascinated by cosmologists’ theories of multiple universes, she speculates that she exists in more than one place at the same time. “I frankly hate Descartes,” she declares. “The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest, where once we lived in wonder.”
Similarly, she understands fiction’s limitations in trying to capture how we live. It tidies things up too much, looks askance at loose ends. “Chaos,” she observes, “is the one truth that narrative must always betray.”
Beware, Jules and Nicole, of Israelis bearing gifts of chaos! Rabbi Menachem Klausner lures Jules to a Sabbath service in a mountain retreat said to be rich with mystical properties. Soon enough, he’s committed, more or less against his will, to funding a film by Klausner’s daughter on the life of King David. Never mind that he’s already donated $2 million for a reforestation project in honor of his parents.
As for Nicole, an Israeli relative introduces her to a retired literature professor, Eliezer Friedman, who claims that Franz Kafka did not die at age 40 in Prague but immigrated to Israel. There he lived in obscurity, working as a gardener under an assumed name, while secretly writing works in Hebrew that have never been published. Now Friedman audaciously urges Nicole, a Kafka devotee, to write the script for a film based on a play that Kafka left unfinished. This brief summary may make these plotlines seem confusing and wildly improbable, but Krauss makes it all work with her usual deft hand. There is no obvious intersection between Jules and Nicole, but we are offered hints. Could Nicole’s doppelganger be Jules’ daughter Maya? Like Maya, she grew up in New York City, has a brother and sister, and has visited Israel many times. Both she and Jules check into the Tel Aviv Hilton, though they never meet. Both take to the desert in search of release from surcease.
As always, Krauss’ prose balances precision and grace. On the desert set for the King David film, the location manager is “skinny enough to be feeding an addiction but too affable to need it.” The director, not affable at all, has “the small eyes and sharp protuberant nose of an animal that spent most of its time underground, forever seized by a frenzied desire to dig its way into the light.”
Lost in the forest dark, Jules longs for a lightness that will whisk him away from his regrets. Nicole is drawn to the light shined by a literature that, rather than forsake the mysteries of human nature, embraces them. That is the kind of fiction, a la Kafka, she admires and wishes to create.
That Krauss, the author, is also named Nicole makes the reader suspect that her character is, in some sense, a stand-in for herself. Here’s a character who is recognized in Israeli supermarkets, as the renowned author surely has been. And all of Krauss’ fiction suggests an affinity for Jewish themes and a determination to stretch conventional narrative in unconventional directions.
At any rate, in “Forest Dark,” Nicole Krauss has once again mastered a light touch in pursuit of weighty themes.
Dan Cryer is author of “Being Alive and Having to Die: The Spiritual Odyssey of Forrest Church.” Email: books@ sfchronicle.com