Exploring a forest of possibilities
Too often novels about writers collapse into the claustrophobic, the solipsistic, the self- regarding. Novels featuring writers that are about fiction itself are beyond the pale. And yet here is Nicole Krauss, heir to the throne of Jewish- American writing once occupied by such names as Singer and Roth and Bellow, to disprove the rule.
The narrator of Forest Dark, Krauss’ fourth book, is mildly autobiographical: two kids, failed marriage, writer’s block. One day, she catches the edge of a radio show about the multiverse — the mind- bending idea that everything ever is possible all at once.
“What if,” she thinks, “each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world?”
The idea of the multiverse, then, is shared with the act of writing fiction. Which accounts for the second narrative strand of the book, the narrator’s simultaneous opposite and mirror: another American Jew named Epstein possessed of near- Hemingway qualities of manliness and vigour whose mind is spooling away, suffering a “slow unfurling of self- knowledge”.
At the heart of Forest Dark is a sense of disengagement, summed up in Dante’s verse from which the title was pinched: “Midway upon the journey of our life/ I found myself within a forest dark/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
Central to rediscovering the path — if indeed that is what we’re heading towards — is Jewishness or, more particularly, Jewish culture and identity as a written culture and identity, from the Bible, to the Talmud, to the literature of the assimilated diaspora.
There is a fascinating counterfactual about Franz Kafka’s life that gorgeously illustrates Krauss’ fascination with the multiverse and all its abundant possibilities. And after all, the city that both the narrator and Epstein wander through, Tel Aviv, is perhaps the only place that began life in a novel. It might be said Theodor Herzl’s Zionist blueprint
Altneuland is the only utopian work to, as it were, come somewhat true. Krauss’ conceit is mind- bending and pulled off which such ease and skill that you’re stunned still by how she’s done it. It’s a seriously accomplished work, bulging at the seams with intricate considerations, elegantly persuasive and lucidly written.