Book #115: Great House: A Novel

Title: Great House: A Novel
Author: Nicole Krauss

I've noticed that I tend to read a lot of novels that have the ": A Novel" designation as part of their titles. Sometimes I think "well, duh, of course this is a novel," and at other times, like with Great House, I think that adding ": A Novel" helps dumb readers like me figure out exactly what Krauss wants to accomplish.

After that introduction, you probably think that I wasn't a fan of Great House, and that couldn't be further from the truth. It's just that Krauss's novel starts out as what appears to be a series of fairly unrelated short stories from five or six different perspectives. After a hundred pages or so, it becomes evident that a massive writing desk appears in many of the stories, and eventually, as characters reappear and become intertwined in successive stories, the story begins to take shape as a novel. But it's not a linear story from a single perspective.

That said, Krauss does a wonderful job of creating complex, flawed characters that readers still want to follow even if they're not especially likable. It seems that almost everyone who comes into contact with the mythical desk in the story has serious emotional baggage of one kind or another. And although I didn't realize it until the story was almost over, the characters are all Jewish, and the desk was stolen from one character's childhood home at the beginning of the Holocaust.

Here's where I feel like the story came up lacking-- in a chapter near the end of the story (probably in the last few pages, although I listened to an audio version of the story and finished it more than a month ago, so my memory might not be the best), Krauss ties the story together by bringing in the idea of a Great House, where Jewish authors collect stories that represent the fragmented experiences of Jews in the diaspora. While I think that idea might resonate for Jewish readers, it felt to me like too much "telling" at the very end-- Krauss did a beautiful job "showing" throughout, that bringing in the analogy at the end felt like unnecessary moralizing. Still, a beautiful book, beautifully read too, and I'm very glad I read it.