INTERVIEW:Nicole Krauss talks to BELINDA McKEONin her home neighbourhood of Brooklyn - her latest novel, 'Great House', is published next week
SHE IS a novelist who has, from the beginning of her career, been preoccupied by the notion of memory; the tricks it can play, the fixations it can breed, the way it can lure us into moments of the heartbreaking, or the uplifting, or the uncanny. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Nicole Krauss harbours a fascination with the studio of the painter Francis Bacon, taken piece by piece from its London base and painstakingly reassembled in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, down to the paint-streaked scraps of paper forming an elaborate carpet of debris across the floor.
To think of the complicated threads of such a space being pulled apart and woven together again so precisely, so intricately; to wonder whether something of the space’s atmosphere could travel from its original site to its new home; to imagine it, cleft from its inhabitant and yet tied to him, to the memory of him and his work, in such a heightened, arresting way; Krauss describes the discovery of the Bacon studio as one which scratched for her an itch which had long seemed unreachable.
“I just became obsessed with it, in the most visceral way,” she says, sitting over coffee in Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighbourhood where she has her home (with her husband, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, and their young sons) and which, with its brownstones and boutiques and cupcake cafes, could hardly seem further from the jagged chaos of Bacon’s little room.
“I felt so much that I needed to make something out of it, and like all things that touch me in that particular way, you want to make a home for it. So I kept trying to sneak it into the book. But it evolved in its own way.”
Krauss has never actually seen the Bacon studio, but that it became such an obsession for her nonetheless makes perfect sense. From her first novel, Man Walks Into A Room(2002), the story of a man whose memory is erased by a brain tumour, to her acclaimed 2005 meditation on loss, language and inheritance, The History of Love, Krauss has created richly layered narratives which often resemble a kind of found poetry; forming their warp and weft are the many images, phrases and ideas gathered by their author in a process that relies far more on intuition and on accident than on plotting or research.
And for her new novel, Great House, Krauss released herself more fully into the freefall of this process than ever before. So disparate and apparently random are the four narratives out of which Krauss built her third book that it's difficult not to imagine that her writing notebooks, or her writing desk, must in the midst of the process have become a kind of microcosm of Bacon's studio at 7 Reece Mews, scattered with the half-finished portraits of a quartet of lonely and aloof characters, living their troubled lives in distant corners of the world.
But these four lives are united by something looming and unforgettable, something which can be shunted from room to room, from country to country, but can never be truly dismantled, can never be tided up or rendered merely decorative.
Linking Krauss’s characters, and linking the atrocities by which each of their lives has been shadowed, is a piece of furniture, a huge dark desk with 19 drawers – one of them locked. It finds its way into the lives of Krauss’s New York writer, Nadia, and her lover, the doomed Chilean revolutionary; of Krauss’s Englishman, Arthur, and his German-Jewish refugee wife; of her Hungarian antiques dealer, Weisz, and his children, and, peripherally, of her Israeli soldier, Dov, whom we meet through the eyes of his cruel but guilt-ridden father.
As in The History of Love, in which a lost novel was passed from one person to another, fusing their painfully separated lives, in Great Housethe desk that pushes its way into – and out of – the lives of Krauss's characters becomes a sort of divining rod which brings them together even as they struggle to keep themselves apart. In Great House, however, the fusion is more complicated; it is far darker than the tender magic of the human spirits which animated The History of Love.
“This is a less obviously hopeful book,” Krauss says. “I think I’ve moved the lens, in a way, in that this book is much more about the struggle to recreate self in order to survive than it is about the pleasure of achieving that.” Which means that the reader faces a tougher task of empathy; these are not characters to fall in love with the way so many readers did with old Leo Gursky or with young Alma in the previous book. In part, this may be Krauss’s reaction to the accusations of whimsy which shadowed critical reaction to The History of Love. Certainly, it grew out of a conscious challenge she set herself as a writer this time around.
“I don’t remember waking up and saying, ‘I’m going to write characters who are – at least in the beginning – unlovable’”, she says. “But I do think that I felt very much that I had written, in The History of Love, characters who from the first pages were charming, were funny, asked to be loved. I was interested in characters who were more prickly. Who, by their own expression, give you the worst of themselves from the beginning. If you think that Nadia is selfish, or that Aaron is a tyrant, it’s because they’ve told you this themselves. You’re not hearing it from other people. Yet it seemed to me that if I stayed with them for long enough to understand what made them this way, the compassion was the same.”
That Krauss arranged it so that she had to work to connect with her own characters is in line with the challenge she set herself more broadly in writing Great House. She has always relied on intuition rather than on outline, has always liked the idea of narrative strands coming to make their own sense rather than having that sense foisted on them. But the voices in this novel do not connect easily. It feels for most of the book that not even something as talismanic as the desk can bring their stories into any kind of synthesis. In writing the novel, Krauss tossed her narrative parameters so far out of sight of one another that she had no choice but to proceed in a deeper darkness than had been the case with her previous books.
“I do arrive at dead ends sometimes,” Krauss says of this process, “but I’m always interested in the tangent, because I might arrive at some unknown land, and that unknown land might become the whole book.”
In fact, it makes sense to think of Krauss writing blindly as she worked towards the knowledge of how her stories would draw together around the trope of the desk. Because, without even realising it, Krauss wrote this novel sitting at a desk which mirrored almost perfectly the desk which she created for her characters. It was, in fact, the desk out of which her fictional desk was hewn. And not until she finished the novel did she look up and recognise it. It was what she has described in a recent essay as a “blind spot”, a trick the writing mind plays on itself to allow itself the freedom to invent. She knows the story makes her sound unobservant, she says, but that kind of observation is not the kind she values.
“I think this blindness, which just crowds everything, means I don’t know where I’m writing from in my life, often,” Krauss says. “I can go ahead and write something thinking it has absolutely nothing to do with me, has no roots at all in my own experience of the world. The most critical thing for me is the sense of wandering, and being okay with dwelling, for a long time, in this place of not knowing.”
Krauss explored her Jewish roots more overtly in The History of Love, in which the central character's experience of fleeing Europe before the start of the second World War mirrored the experience of her own grandparents (it also, as critics did not fail to note, chimed interestingly with the predicament of Foer's older character in Everything is Illuminated). But in Great HouseKrauss approaches her Jewish inheritance in a manner that has less to do with plot than with theme. The novel's title – as we do eventually learn from a character – comes from the story of the first-century Jewish sage Yochanan ben Zakkai, who, upon being exiled from Jerusalem, gathered a remnant of scholars in Yavneh and started a small school – later known as the " great house"– in which the Talmud would be composed.
What was most attractive to Krauss in that story was the notion of the imagination, the idea, and eventually the book, as the response to catastrophic loss. Though she has not seen Bacon’s studio in Dublin, as a graduate student at Oxford she paid many visits to the Freud Museum in London, which is located in the house to which Freud and his family fled in 1938. It is an extraordinary place, not least because Freud’s family recreated his study to look just as it had in Vienna, and it remains that way today, down to the books on his shelves, the artefacts grouped on his desk, the Iranian rug draped over his psychoanalytic couch.
“It gave me tremendous comfort, visiting there,” Krauss says, “which is a strange thing to say about Freud. But it was the atmosphere of this very intimate place where this man, this mind, resided. In the catalogue, they encourage you to walk the house, as though you’re walking towards the mind.”
At that time, Krauss wasn’t yet writing fiction; she started out as a poet, which is perhaps why the idea of metaphor is so central to her novels. But when she came to that form, what came to mind was the memory of how Freud and his family made what they could of their exile. “I started to think about the novel as house,” she says. “Like the idea that you live in a house where something is always broken, like a stuck window, or a broken door; the idea of the comfort of living in a place which has flaws, and the duration during which you can live there. And the idea, too, of the novelist trying to create in her work what she doesn’t have in her life; the novel as the writer’s home; stitching together these fragments to create a whole that has meaning, that’s stable. And most of all that can be left, and returned to. That’s a metaphor that is always deepening in my mind.”
Great Houseby Nicole Krauss is published by Viking next Thursday, £16.99
