When asked to consider how memory works, do you tend to think about how the smell of oatmeal cookies triggers a vivid memory of your grandmother or how a song takes you back to that high school dance? When I think about memory I think of Proust and his madeleines. I think about the nights, as a child after a day at the beach, when I would experience that peculiar physical memory phenomenon that allowed me to feel the ebb and flow of the waves as I fell asleep. I’ve always thought that to have amnesia would be horrifying, and to lose the ability to process long term memory (anyone remember that Adam Sandler movie, 50 First Dates?) even more so. But to have a memory that’s infallible, too, would be just as traumatic. In Jill Price’s memoir The Woman Who Can’t Forget, she writes from her unique perspective of having perfect recall of everything she’s ever seen, thought, read, and experienced. Instead of the flood of bittersweet nostalgia when you heard that song from your prom, what would it be like vividly to remember the awkwardness of the dance with your crush, every inane thing you said to him, or how you stepped on her toe. The beauty of memory is that it’s forgiving and self-preservative, and to that end it has the ability to be selective, to meld an experience into a whole that’s more ideal than the sum of its parts.
Great House, Nicole Krauss’s new novel, while not about memory per se, features characters who are relating past events. There are misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misreadings, yes, but more than that Krauss seems to have used the function of memory as the medium of her story. There are four main narrators, and each simultaneously relates and interprets his story as his memory serves, without the burdensome need to follow a timeline and sometimes even to give the reader much context. Tenuously linking the narratives is a desk — an immense, imposing piece of furniture that contains many drawers — for some of Krauss’s characters it conspicuously represents the very essence of their identity. Most of the characters are writers, though one is in the heights of procrastination on her doctoral thesis, and one shamefully (because of paternal disapproval) and in installments persists in writing a story about a shark who is forced to absorb the nightmares of dreamers hooked up to its tank with tubes. All of the characters are extremely lonely, and sometimes their voices can seem quite small, and they themselves admit it would be a relief to disappear:
Until my eyes adjusted enough to make out the lines of the furniture, or some detail of the previous day came back to me, I hung suspended in the unknown, the unknown which, still loosely tethered to consciousness, slips so easily into the unknowable. A fraction of a second only, a fraction of pure, monstrous existence free of all landmarks, of the most exhilarating terror, stamped out almost immediately by a grasp of reality which I came to think of at such times as blinding, a hat pulled over one’s eyes, since though I knew that without it life would be almost uninhabitable, I resented it nevertheless for all it spared me.
Only memory, in those moments, keeps them from being lost.
Kaycie wrote about The History of Love a few weeks ago, and we talked about how both novels showcase Krauss’s unconventional storytelling. You may remember that Nicole Krauss’s much acclaimed second novel was Lemuria’s First Editions Club pick for June 2005. We recently sold our last signed first edition of The History of Love, but we still have first editions of Great House — look for the front page review in the NYT Book Review tomorrow.
The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie (Crown, October 19, 2010)
