Great House by Nicole Krauss, Reviewed by Sara Falls

Great House by Nicole Krauss
Reviewed by Sara Falls


Nicole Krauss has a lovely, resonant poetry to her writing. Her characters are interesting and complex, and her Man Walks Into a Room is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read. So I was anxiously awaiting her newest, Great House, a National Book Award finalist, to come out in paperback. I was prepared to love it, for it to make my list of all-time favorites. And so maybe I just set this book up to not meet my expectations. But I didn't love it, and I've been trying to figure out why.

The book is a series of stories tied together into a novel. I tend to find this a risky choice for an author--Krauss has to tie these stories together in a way that rises above gimmick. And she does, mostly. The stories' characters are loosely intertwined around a massive, important desk and the death of a young poet at the hands of the Pinochet regime. They are also tied together thematically around the idea of loss: One narrator has lost his wife of many years; another has lost a son (not to death but to distance and lack of understanding), and of course there's the loss of the poet--a friend, a would-be lover, a would-be son.

Despite these connections, as I read I worried that the weave of the book was tenuous, that certain characters too coincidentally looked just like people in the other stories, that the plot pieces that held these stories together as a novel, and not just a collection of short stories, was mere gimmick. I half hoped that all the characters would suddenly be revealed as actually all being part of the same story in a twist of story-telling ingenuity, and I half hoped this wouldn’t happen, knowing all too well that it would feel like a trick. But I longed for something to tie these sad characters together beyond the mere devices of plot Krauss had constructed. It’s not until the end that the title is explained, and in this moment, the thematic connections become truly moving. Here, ten pages to the end, we learn the meaning of “great house”—it comes from the Old Testament and the idea that “every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned” when Jerusalem burned. Krauss writes, “Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form,” and we suddenly truly understand what she’s been doing all along in giving us these lonely, empty characters—she’s been showing us the ways that people become defined by their losses in life.

Despite this powerful idea, I finished the book with some criticisms nagging at me: Why are there unexplained plot holes? (At one point it seems that another character has hit and killed someone with her car, but we never know who the victim is. What happens to the disappeared son?) Again, this feels gimmicky, an overly wrought attempt to make us question. And finally, given Krauss’s skill as a writer, why do all her narrators have the same voice? Surely she could offer more variety in their sad, swallowed-up, yet poetic narratives.

In the end, I found Great House an admirable yet flawed book. I look forward to reading Krauss in the future; she clearly has a gift for seeing deeply into people, and I look forward to another book that, like Man Walks Into A Room, will make my all-time favorite list.