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Nicole Krauss: 'I take great pleasure in thinking'
The bestselling American author tells Rachel Cooke why she is surprised her fiction is labelled 'difficult' – and how her new novel was inspired by a piece of furniture
Rachel Cooke
The Observer, Sunday 13 February 2011
Great House by Nicole Krauss
When Nicole Krauss talks about her new novel, Great House, her hands flutter before her like tiny birds. It is, you see, such a difficult book to describe. Mysterious, absorbing, and full of ideas, it works like one of those old Chinese puzzle boxes: it will spring open in the end, but a certain amount of patience is required before its innermost secrets become apparent. She laughs. "I think of novels as houses," she says. "You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer. And I have a very strong spatial sense. Perhaps it's genetic. My grandfather was an engineer, and my father was first an engineer and then an orthopaedic surgeon. The feeling I have when I write of putting all these pieces together, and noticing how they create a shape, and then knowing that I have built something and that it will stand up; it's so satisfying to me."
The elusive but exquisitely beautiful Great House has four narrators: an unhappy young New Yorker who once spent a night with a Chilean poet called Daniel Varsky; an Israeli widower who cannot reach his estranged son emotionally; an elderly British man who longs to discover what it is that his refugee wife has kept secret all her life; and another young American woman who, in Oxford, falls in love with the male half of a mysterious pair of reclusive siblings (their father is a famous Hungarian antiques dealer). Humming away at the edges of the story is the Holocaust; this is a book about grief and loss, and the way it is handed down through the generations almost imperceptibly. But, centre stage and eventually coming to link these disparate, scattered lives, is a piece of furniture: a monstrous great desk, dark and brooding, with 19 drawers, one of which is permanently locked.
Krauss has already told me that her books often start as a single image. Was the desk such an image in the case of Great House? "Yes, and no." The novel began its life as a short story, which was eventually collected in an anthology. It was only as Krauss wrote a short paragraph for the anthology's editor, explaining its source of inspiration, that she looked up and realised that her own desk was very similar to the one in her story. "I inherited it from the former owner of my house, who'd built it into the wall according to some very esoteric specifications. It doesn't have 19 drawers, but it is huge. I knew I was going to have to work at it; it was the obvious place. But I hated this desk. The trouble was, though, that to get rid of it, you would have to destroy it." In spite of her dislike, she began to feel a weird sense of responsibility towards it. So when she came to write a book about the burden of emotional inheritance, the desk insinuated its way into her story as a symbol of that load. And has she come to love the desk as a result? "No!" she wails. "I still hate the desk. I think we're going to have to move."
I had been rather dreading meeting Krauss: purest jealousy, I suppose. Wildly intelligent (she has degrees from Stanford and Oxford, and the poetry she wrote as a student was admired by Joseph Brodsky), and extremely privileged (she grew up on Long Island in a Bauhaus masterpiece), her second novel, The History of Love, sold more than 250,000 copies, was translated into 35 languages, and was shortlisted for the Orange, Medicis and Femina prizes. She is beautiful, too. Oh yes, and she's married to Jonathan Safran Foer, wunderkind author of the novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (they have two small children). But when I walk into the coffee shop near where she lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, all this stuff just flies away. She is lovely: intense but so wry, and warm (she apologises for the freezing cold weather as if she were personally responsible for it). And I like the way she answers my questions – as if I'm so clever to have thought of them.
Great House is Krauss's third novel, but this doesn't mean she finds it easy to send a book out into the world, like some poor orphan. "The first time, I didn't know what to feel about it, and the feelings only came slowly, later on, many months after publication: feelings of wondering about whether I could justify writing another book. I don't know what I expected, but I felt like it had done nothing in the world. Perhaps there was some secret hope that the effect would be palpable. Of course, it was never going to be! But when you're younger, you want to be understood. I'm less fixated now on the idea of how something will be received, but even so, it [publication] is getting harder. This book is so personal to me, on every level."
In what way? "Well, I used to write mostly in the third person, but now I'm writing only in the first person. I've discovered that what thrills me is the sheer intimacy of becoming someone else. In the case of Great House, I felt these people were so naked, and in the process of stepping into their shoes, you're also shining a light on yourself, and these two things are tangled up in ways I can't even untangle." The peculiar thing is, though, that she has no idea what any of her characters look like. "I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind."
On a long book tour of the US, Krauss was taken aback to find that one of the things she heard most frequently from readers was: "this book is difficult". "I was so surprised," she says. "I realise that it's challenging, that it refuses to come together too easily, but I didn't think of it as a difficult read." So how to explain it? Krauss believes – or at least, she worries – that in the west, we are moving towards the end of effort. "We've arrived at this place where we just thoughtlessly plunge towards whatever the thing is that will allow us to make less of an effort. We know we're diminishing experience. We know that it was richer to walk to the store, talk to the bookseller, maybe meet your neighbour than it is to click online. But we can't stop ourselves. We're programmed to do the 'easier' thing. That's why people have Kindles. It's easier not to have to turn the page. All that's left of turning is this bizarre little sound to remind us of it. People no longer have the concentration to finish things; we skim along on the surface, and it's miserable."
She works at home, alone, and tries not to get too hung up about reviews. "The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition. You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go." I can sense that she is reluctant to talk about the other novelist in the house (perhaps she has looked at the dispiriting example of other literary couples, and realised that if she wants to be taken seriously as writer in her own right, best to try and pretend one doesn't even have a husband). But the pram in the hall seems fair game. Has motherhood made her writing life harder or easier? Krauss stirs her hot chocolate carefully. "There was a moment, quite a long moment, after my son was born when I wondered whether my ambition would return to me. I remember saying to my mom: my inner life has gone. But eventually, it flowed back, and when it did, I was surprised how much depth of feeling flooded into the work. Everything... trembled. And now, I'm so grateful for my inner life; it's almost visceral, when I'm working and alone." She smiles. "I take real pleasure in thinking."
