Desk-bound, needing to get out more

Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all.

Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing, loss, and of how Jews attempt to cope with the destruction that characterises their history. The title refers to the Book of Kings: ‘All the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, he burned with fire’. If, as one of Krauss’ spokesmen puts it, ‘every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one’, would the Great House be built again?

The book divides into two sets of linked sections, the halves mirroring each other like parallel series of drawers in a desk. The action (and inaction) does, indeed, organise itself round a desk; an enormous complicated, dominating desk, passed from one character to another. Who, if anyone, truly owns the desk? And what is the secret of the one locked drawer?

There are four narrators, two female, two male. They are all Jewish, all connected with writing, and all, frankly, need to get out more. They inhabit different continents, different periods of time, but further connections emerge, very slowly. First is Nadia, a middle-aged New Yorker; she has written seven novels at the desk, entrusted to her by a murdered Chilean poet, but has done little else with her life. The putative owner of the desk turns up to claim it; will Nadia be able to write without it?

Next, an ageing Israeli widower, the most potent and convincing of the voices, rails against his failure to communicate with his estranged son.

Third is Arthur Bender, a gentle British academic; daily he accompanies his writer wife Lotte to the swimming holes on Hampstead Heath where she enacts a ritual of disappearance and re-emergence.