Local Event: Nicole Krauss - Great House

This Thursday, I joined Lynn Rosen's Sneak Peak class for Nicole Krauss's reading at the Central Library on the Parkway.  Everyone in Lynn's class has already finished reading the newly-released Great House, a fact that surprised even Krauss.  (The class reads advance review copies of soon-to-be-published books.)

I saw Nicole Krauss when she was touring for History of Love.  This time around she seems more comfortable in front of a crowd.   Instead of reading from Great House, Krauss read from something she had prepared about the making of the novel.  Not only was it an exercise that addressed one of her obsessions (memory), but it anticipated those how did you write this questions.  When the final proof of the book is at the publisher, she says, it's like a door is closed.  Locked.  And soon the writer herself begins to forget all that went into the making of the story, how it came to be, the decisions involved, the discarded ideas.  The door is closed and the writer has lost the key.

Great House started as the short story "The Young Painters" published in The New Yorker, in which a New York novelist works at a desk she inherited from a Chilean poet after he was disappeared.  A year after she finished the story she went back and asked, what would happen if the desk was taken away from the novelist?

She had three elements, three obsessions going in -- a desk, a shark and a reassembled room.  She knew there would be four voices and that in some way they were going to connect. There was no outline, no structure. 

Writing for Krauss resembles anthropologists searching for dinosaurs.  The crew start out following their intuition about where a dinosaur might have fallen.  They walk back and forth looking for a claw or a knuckle.  When they find something, they dig until they uncover the dinosaur they've been walking back and forth on top of all along.  That's her process.  Follow her obsession, her intuition, until she uncovers the story she's been walking on all along.


In listening to her describe her process.  You might think, oh this is too intellectual. There's no emotion. This sounds suspiciously like a plotless endeavor.   But you would be wrong.  Now, I haven't read Great House yet.  (The Sneak Peak class thoroughly endorses it.)  Her second novel, History of Love, is one of my all-time favorite novels.  The character of Leo Gursky is one of the most memorable and lovable people I have met.  As a woman in the audience confessed, she sees Leo in a coffee shop whenever someone spills something and thinks that person wants to be noticed.  Krauss's obsessions do meet up and create a novel you want to keep reading. 

If you missed this reading, look for the podcast.  It takes a bit for the library to get them up.  I just listened to Jonathan Franzen's reading and the quality of the recording is very good.  Of course it's not the same as being there and having the opportunity to ask a question if you are so moved, then standing in line to get your book signed and being a blithering idiot in front of your literary idol, but it's good.

McCracken

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to hear Elizabeth McCracken read at Temple University.  Usually, I don't go to see a writer read unless I have read her work or am at least familiar with it.  In this case, I hadn't read or heard much about McCracken's work.  My friend Lynn Rosen, the best read woman in Philadelphia, said I would love her. 

McCracken read a short story told from multiple points of view.  A rather ambitious work to read aloud.  At times, I must admit I was confused about who was speaking and about what exactly was going on, but I was still sucked in.  McCracken made me smile, made me frightened, made me think.  I was completely emotionally enthralled by the end.  

Before McCracken read I teased her that I would buy one of her books if she impressed me.  After the reading, I went to the nearest bookstore and bought The Giant's House.  It's about a boy named  James who is 8'2" at 17.  His growing is out of control, his growing is killing him.  And yet, it is Peggy Cort the librarian narrator who is the freak.  A woman who has trouble making real human connection until she falls in love with James.  Peggy's inner life is so compelling, her thoughts on love, on loneliness, on life are funny and sad.  Here's a taste of Peggy:

. . . I was outside on my park bench, eating some tragic sandwich I'd assembled from odds and ends out of my fridge--sliced apple, some cheese, pickle relish.  Single people eat sadly--they cobble together things left from shopping trips based on dreams of all the meals they'd fix for themselves, all the ways they'd treat themselves to something grand; those dreams, for me, died by the next day and, despite my best hopes, I wanted only canned hash and apples.  Dogged by practicality, I had to use everything I'd bought anyhow.

I ran into McCracken in the lobby as she was rushing to catch a flight home to her children  - a two-month-old and a twenty-month-old.  I must say, as a mother of two, I vividly remember those days and was even more impressed with how smart and witty (and coherent!) she was during the reading and the question and answer session.  

I look forward to reading more of her work.  Check out Elizabeth McCracken's website.