12.31.2005

History of Love by Nicole Krauss

I think that the novel is an inflexible medium. As much as writers seem to yearn to find new ways to show language on a page, to create multiple perspectives, to fuck with punctuation and syntax, I hold that the novel wants to tell a story, to move from beginning to end. Otherwise, reading begins to feel something like watching a pooly cut film.*

Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, and wealthy young New York writing couples are obnoxious. Now, after reading her novel, I'm closer to bored with the whole thing. The concept is solid: man writes a novel about his true love. War separates him from both the art and the girl. The book resurfaces, published. How? Why? The problem lies in Krauss's decision to create multiple eccentric narrators, scene hogs who tell their stories in very different ways. I started to dread the shift between perspectives, feeling a little like John Cusack in Being John Malcovich ending up on the freeway. Other stylistic irritations include a series of pages containing only a single paragraph or sentence. I understand that space signifies distance, Nicole, but it's such a tired trick.

One last thing: "But" is not a sentence. Stop doing that.

One more last thing: I understand that this report smacks a little of Victorianism. That's funny considering I am plenty bored by many of the long, classic examples of the genre (except Dickens. I love Dickens. And French novels are the best. Madame Bovary and The Red and Black deserve to be read.) Anyway, what I've come to sneeringly refer to as "concept novels" take all the joy out of language becuase they try too hard. See any novel by Jeanette Winterson.

* Exceptions exist, of course, and I could roll out all the big dogs of high modernism. Joyce and Woolf make it work, and I love them for it.

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