TO BE A MAN
Stories
By Nicole Krauss
Ralph Ellison said that “some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” I returned to this idea again and again while reading Nicole Krauss’s superb new collection, “To Be a Man.” In each of these moving stories, we feel the weight not only of family, but of history and faith and leaving a legacy, pressing down on every one of her characters.
Birth and death, joy and mourning, love and heartbreak — these too animate the collection. But as a writer Krauss is less interested in describing life’s grand explosions than she is in showing how people make sense of the rubble.
“To Be a Man” is Krauss’s first story collection, after the acclaimed novels “Man Walks Into a Room,” “The History of Love,” “Great House” and, most recently, “Forest Dark.” Like those longer works, these short fictions also explore the themes of memory and spirituality and transnational Jewishness. Her protagonists often live in limbo; as the narrator in the story “Amour” puts it, Jewish homes can be spaces “where being American was an accident of history, English an accident of history, nature an accident of history.” Despite the common threads, Krauss still somehow seems to have invented a new form for each novel, each story — their characters so fully realized that Krauss’s deft authorial hand is rarely evident. Her characters seem to dictate how their own stories ought to be told.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of November. See the full list. ]
Each story in “To Be a Man” is governed by its own unique and intricate logic, yet the stylistic differences are never gimmicky. Rather, the structures are possessed of an effortless elasticity, expanding and contracting to fit the stories these characters are compelled to tell. Many of the pieces, for example, barrel far beyond where we expect them to end — past any kind of resolution and into frightening and surprising territory. In the opening story, “Switzerland,” a 13-year-old boarding school student learns her friend has had a dangerous encounter with an older man. The rendezvous and its fallout are fraught and absorbing, but Krauss doesn’t stop at their immediate impact. She leads us into the present day, as the student, now our adult narrator, observes the way men look at her own young daughter. “She has a proudness about her that refuses to grow small,” she says, but “it’s her curiosity in her own power, its reach and its limit, that frightens me. Though maybe the truth is that when I am not afraid for her, I envy her.” And just like that, the narrator is confronted with the terrifying difference between being someone’s daughter and someone’s mother.
In the story “End Days,” a powerful marvel of realism, another teenage girl grapples with her parents’ shockingly amicable divorce (“they were in agreement about no longer needing to agree on how to live the rest of their lives”) while spending a summer living alone amid California wildfires. “Zusya on the Roof,” narrated in the same Old World Yiddishkeit readers may recognize from “The History of Love,” captures a lifetime of pain and intergenerational misunderstanding spackled over with an old man’s brusque, grumpy outrage.
[ Read an excerpt from “To Be a Man.” ]
In “I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,” the American narrator’s father has died, and a mysterious stranger makes himself at home in the dead man’s Tel Aviv apartment. Although we never find out who this man is, how or why he has appeared — or perhaps because these questions are never answered — we gradually come to accept and even welcome the visitor’s presence.
Krauss’s refusal to adhere to formal conventions, in time frame or plot resolution, for example, gives her stories a certain energy, consistently conjuring an aura of both intimacy and vastness. The closer we get to these individuals’ internal landscapes, the closer we come to perceiving the global forces that inform them. So many of these characters live with their feet in the United States and their hearts in Israel. As she writes in “The Husband,” these are people whose “roots are sown in two places and so can never grow deeply enough in either.”
The ties that are strained here are not just geographical or cultural, but personal. Many of the women in this collection have separated from their husbands, and Krauss’s depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. Pondering her parents’ divorce and her grandmother’s “approaching death,” one character wonders whether her mother felt “time was running out for the things she still wanted from life” — a sentiment that could be applied to almost everyone in this book (and perhaps some of us reading it, too). A dancerlives alone with sons “who needed her for everything, it seemed, just as the men in her life had always needed her for everything.” Another woman describes feeling a “quiet euphoria” wash over her upon realizing she no longer requires the support of a man. Krauss’s stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they’re hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers. As one character tells us, “Order would be found only in the world to come.”
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Book Review: ‘To Be a Man: Stories,’ by Nicole Krauss - The New York Times
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