Krauss Details Grieving Psyches in ‘Great House’

In Nicole Krauss’s third novel, “Great House,” one of her characters muses, “[M]y father, a scholar of history, taught me that the absence of things is more useful than their presence. Though many years later, half a century after he died, I stood… and thought, Useful for what?” The speaker is Weisz, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who specializes in retrieving antique furniture for mourners who wish to reconstruct memories of their dead loved ones. Weisz and his four fellow speakers narrate their ways through the challenges posed by grief, in an attempt to reconcile the absences caused by their respective losses. But despite the interior focus of the work, Krauss manages to avoid writing a novel whose sole preoccupation is the abstract and inevitably cliché emotions of her grieving characters. Rather, her strength as a writer emerges as she focuses on the overwhelming onslaught of thoughts which plague each mourner.

The most effective aspect of Krauss’s “Great House” is the unusual structure of her first person narrative, which shifts between the perspectives of her five protagonists. As her narrators directly address their thoughts and confessions towards specific, cognitively or physically absent characters, Krauss reveals new depths of each speaker’s consciousness. With this form of narration, the characters divulge more about their inner selves than an ordinary first person or omniscient narrative would allow.

A recent widower, and one of Krauss’s narrators, says to his physically absent son: “I need to ask. Will you visit me once I’m gone? Will you come from time to time and sit with me? It’s absurd, I’ll be nothing, just a handful of inert material, and yet I feel it would help me to go more easily if I knew that you would come sometime.”  With this deceptively simple proposition from father to son, Krauss illuminates the concerns of an aging father: the recognition of his own mortality and his regret for never achieving a reciprocal relationship between himself and his son. While it may be psycho-voyeuristically estranging for the father to ask “Is that what you will make of my death, Dov?” in an unwitting address to the reader, such marked questions and assertions preclude any of the narrators’ attempts at affectation and provide footholds for the reader delving into the consciences of the speakers.

Krauss’s subtle shifts of perspective are equally effective from one narrator to the next. Another character, Mr. Bender, struggles to reconcile the woman that he knew as his love and the woman he discovers she actually was—the woman he “grossly misunderstood” prior to her death. As Bender recovers more information about his late lover’s past, he divulges information about himself and the realities of their relationship. “Suddenly I wanted to cry,” Bender states upon first realizing how little he knows of his lover, “Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved….what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?” But as he begins to reconstruct her life and to pick apart the image she had presented to him, he confesses, “All of my life I had been trying to imagine myself into her skin. Imagine myself into her loss. Trying and failing…My love for her was a failure of the imagination.” Through this process of grief, Bender is finally able to find a release from a lost love that was illusory at best.

Despite Krauss’s ability to open the psyches of her narrators, there is a sense of familiarity that looms over “Great House.” In her earlier novel, “The History of Love,” parallel narrators who are connected by a novel within collide as they attempt to reassert the love they each had lost. “Great House” treads similar territory, with several grieving narrators revolving about a single desk which each associates with his or her respective loss. While Krauss manages to avoid simply repeating the terms of her previous novel through a myriad of clever reversals and false leads as her narrators piece together their post-loss lives, her reversion to the same overall structure and theme threatens her attempts at originality.

Nonetheless, “Great House” succeeds due to its self restrained ambition and to Krauss’s willingness to pose questions about life, love, and loss without feeling the need to answer those that are beyond human reach. Instead, Krauss gives her narrators and, in turn, her reader, the cognitive space to decide what to make of their personal experiences.

—Staff writer Renee G. Stern can be reached at rstern@college.harvard.edu.