A Krauss House

As I think I've reported on this blog before, I have a tendency to discover new writers long after most of the rest of the country does. This is certainly the case with Nicole Krauss, author of three novels--Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House--each more successful than the last. Great House, a National Book Award finalist, came recommended by my wife. In fact, she practically forced the book on me. One of those Oh-my-gosh-you-have-to-read-this moments. Well, I didn't right away. (I usually have too many other books I'm trying to get through.) But I have now, and I can't urge it strongly enough to anyone interested in literary historical fiction. The book is so carefully crafted, each sentence a model of clarity and incision, and yet too brimming with subtle--and sometimes not so subtle-- feeling. It's a book that is both small and vast at the same time. Similar to Erika Dreifus's superb short story collection Quiet Americans, Great House doesn't merely dramatize historical events but explores the very nature and force of history itself, revealing how seemingly insignifcant decisions and actions can affect the lives of those who live decades further on and in entirely different continents. It's the old "If a butterfly flaps its wings . . . " adage brilliantly rendered.

The novel is broken into two parts and each part into four sections. Each of the four sections is rendered in a different first person voice and details the lives of very different characters. We are shown New York, London, Oxford, and Israel, with quick stopovers in a host of various European cities. Meanwhile, we move back and forth in time, from the 1930s up until the present day. By design, for the longest time the different sections remain vastly separate from one another, so much so that a reader might ask himself what some of them are doing in the same novel. But, ah, you must trust the book. The connections gradually and unerringly and even tragically come into focus. If there's any theme the book demonstrates it is the Law of Unintended Consequences. One of the central characters, a Jewish novelist named Lotte Berg who was forced to flee her hometown of Nuremberg for England in the 30s, long ago accepted the gift of a desk from a gentleman lover (exactly who the lover was is one of the few matters left unclarified by Krauss). Lotte later gave the desk away to a fan of her books, an action that, with fatalistic inevitabilty, acts as the catalyst for much of the disappointment, rancor, and literal devastation dramatized later in the book. Great House comes to its realizations and its climaxes indirectly--that is, through its seemingly disparate four fold structure and its back and forth movement in time and space--but come to them it does. And the reader is not left unaffected. It is a masterfully, pristinely rendered work, a novel that has been carved rather than shot out, one that will dwell inside you long after you stop reading. Of all the many lessons I took from the book, one is this: In a world in which you can never completely control the consequences of your actions, a world in which finally you can't control anything but yourself, the very least you can do, maybe the only thing you can do, is Tell the Truth. Whatever comes after that, let come.

Personal Note: As you read this--if you're reading it on or near the day it's posted--my family travels along the east coast of the United States visiting our relatives. And it happens to be the birthday of my oldest son. Happy 15th, bud. I can't believe you're that old. You still seem like a kid to your mom and me. But I know that you know you certainly aren't.

AWP is on! Day 1

I put up a quick note this morning about successfully arriving in Washington despite the terrible weather country-wide; so now, much later in the day, I thought I would share some news and reflections from day 1 of the AWP conference. This will prove to be my most session-heavy day, I'm sure, and by design. There's a diminishing returns quality to a massive conference like AWP. Too many sessions and your brain turns to jello. So while I'll still be at the conference, tomorrow and Saturday will likely be a bit lighter in terms of my session involvement.

Today's sessions, I'm happy to report, were all fine. Early on, I attended a session on encouraging and enabling the use of multi-media strategies for students' storytelling. As one speaker remarked, this subject is urgent. The literary landscape is changing under our feet, almost by the minute, as innovations like the iPad fundamentally alter what reading means. Anyone who wishes to write in the literary landscape of the future needs to be fluent in multi-media. Even if this idea is disheartening to a former curmudgeon like myself, I can't deny that it's also probably accurate. I also attended a really fascinating session on the use of monsters (liberally defined) in literary fiction. While the conference, because of massive travel problems caused by the Big Storm, has not been nearly as crowded as in the past, this session was jammed. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. After all, the tremendous--and growing--popularity of supernatural fiction can't help but be felt, and reiterated, by AWP conference goers. And that's not a bad thing. The presenters named some titles that really sound intriguing and that I need to read, especially given that I taught a Special Topics course at UCA last fall called "Supernatural Realism."

I attended two other sessions today. One was a pedagogy forum session featuring short papers on the teaching of writing fiction and drama. The session went fine--I heard some wonderful approaches for teaching specific aspects of craft--but before the session got underway the moderator announced that starting next year AWP will no longer include pedagogy forum sessions in its program. The rationale behind this decision was supposedly a desire to increase AWP's commitment to pedagogy as a subject matter, a statement that I do not believe and that makes no sense. Whatever becomes of pedagogy at AWP, I will regret the loss of the pedagogy forum. It provided an important entryway for graduate students and y0ung instructors to come to AWP and present. It also is the only part of the AWP program in which the acceptance of one's proposal is based solely on its individual merits and not on whether it was included as part of a shiny-glamorous panel configuration.

The last session I attended was a very enlightening session on contemporary Jewish-American fiction, featuring several expert voices, including Margot Singer, Anna Solomon, and Erika Dreifus. A friend of my wife's spotted me there and we chatted afterwards. I'm afraid my attendance confused her. "Are you Jewish?" she asked. No, I assured her, smiling. Her confusion was perfectly understandable. After all, the audience was almost entirely Jewish. But in fact my roots are pure Irish Catholic (or at least as pure as someone's can be whose last name is Vanderslice).

Sitting through today's sessions, I realized that I've adopted a Code of AWP Behavior for myself, a code meant to make the conference more useful and less stressful. To end this post, I'll share some items of my Code. Rule 1: No forced networking. For networking to be profitable it also has to be genuine. Forcing yourself into conversation with someone for no other reason that to stick your name in their face makes you come across as bumbling, illiterate, and possibly mentally retarded. Just go to the sessions, learn what you can, ask questions when you feel like it, and don't feel compelled to talk to a soul if you don't want to. Don't worry about making any specific number of contacts. Just enjoy. With so many writers floating around, you're bound to fall into conversation with one of them anyway--a more natural conversation, that is. Rule 2: Leave the conference hotel for meals and as often as you can. Any conference as big as this one will drive you bonkers after a while and surely mess with your perspective. Get out. Cross the street. Realize that there is sub shop over there filled with people who don't all want to talk about their just completed sonnet sequence or the novel they are trying to find an agent for. Normal people still exist. Rule 3: Avoid the how-to-publish-your-book-sessions or any variation thereof. These sessions reek with desperation and oneupmanship. They will curdle your soul and make you doubt the benign nature of humanity. Besides, rarely does one ever learn anything new in them. How many times does one need to be told how to compose a letter to an agent or that the traditional market for fiction is dwindling to nonexistence? Rule 4: Write while you are here. Most people will tell you that it's impossible to write at AWP--but that's a flat out lie. If you call yourself a writer and you "can't write," then shame on you. Go to the bar and compose a few flash fictions over a pint or two. Skip a morning session and draft a story in your hotel room. Grab a lobby seat for twenty minutes and jot down a poem in your notebook. So what if the efforts aren't your best ever? That's not the point of this Rule. The point of this Rule: For a writer, writing tames your soul, lowers your blood pressure, puts you in equilibirum. It's what you do. It's who you are. It's why you are here. Good to remind yourself of that from day to day when faced with so many people urgent for that next job or book contract. Finally, it's the writing that matters. And it's the writing you have to love. Otherwise you're in the wrong business.

If I think of any other Rules in the Code, I'll let you all know.

The quiet beauty of Quiet Americans

Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading Erika Dreifus's new short story collection Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio, 2011) a book that is as difficult to type as it is easy to enjoy. At the same time one could call it historical fiction, third person family memoir, autobiographical fiction, contemporary literary fiction, "fact"ion, or holocaust fiction. Certainly the historical nature of Dreifus's book makes it a perfect subject for this blog. But its concerns are not merely fictive or exclusively historical. Like all good fiction what the book finally does is question, examine, and get at the nature of truth itself, which in Dreifus's collections proves to be far more complicated than her characters ever expect. Anyone with an interest in the holocaust and how it led immigrants to this country needs to read this book. Anyone who simply wants to enjoy engaging, relevant, and thoughtful fiction by a subtle practitioner of the craft needs to read it even more.

Dreifus's purpose in Quiet Americans is to show how both in small and large ways the holocaust shaped, and still does shape, generations of Americans, families whose history in this country began because of the terrifying social and political climate inside the Third Reich. As illustrative and disturbing are the well known chronicles of the "final solution"--Elie Wiesel's Night, Olga Lengyel's Five Chimneys, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning--Quiet Americans reveals how truly broad the legacy of the holocaust is, a breadth those other writers could not imagine because of their closeness its initial and most horrific events.

The book opens with three historical fictions, each asking questions that are both funadmental and irresolvable. In the first, "For Services Rendered," an immigrant doctor must struggle with the fact that he owes his life and the life of his family to the timely advice and practical assistance of Hermann Goering and his wife, the same Goering who at the time is being tried as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Should Dr. Weldmann, out of a sense of personal responsibility, write a letter of support for Goering or his wife, or would doing so be a violation against the millions of Jews who suffered under the regime Goering fought for? In the cunningly narrated "Matrilineal Descent," which opens even before the onset of the First World War, the frustrating, inexcusable coldness and lack of assistance shown by Emma Gross toward her more popular younger sister Karoline--and to the sister's young son after Karoline kills herself--is contrasted in one chilling sentence at story's end with the wider evil to come. How harshly do we feel like condemning Emma when we find out that come 1940 she was deported by the Nazis and never heard from again? Can we possibly say that the punishment fits her "crime"? And in "Lebensraum," we meet Karoline's son as he is in 1944. He has emigrated to America, joined the army, and now works stateside as a cook in a camp for German prisoners of war. The same Germans who drove him from his home country, and killed so many of his relatives, are put to work for Josef in his kitchen. The awkwardness is felt on all sides, brought to a point when Josef thinks he hears one of the Germans mutter "Jude" under his breath. Things become even more awkward when some of the Germans are permitted to observe Josef's son's bris. What, the story asks, ought to permitted, even expected, in this new, broad, unthreatening country, and what amounts to a violation? Outside of the Old World context, the answers are not simple, but, the story points out, the pain surrounding such decisions is what the holocaust has engendered, just one of its many terrible, unfortunate outcomes.

The last four stories in the book are set much further ahead in time. In them we find anti-Semitic actions and sentiments reborn at the 1972 Olympics and in post-9/11 America in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers. The original immigrants to the U.S. still struggle to put the holocaust behind them, while theirs son and daughters--and grandsons and granddaughters--try to come to terms with family history and encourage the older generation to do the same. But how much pushing is too much pushing? And do the younger generations really appreciate what they will find when they begin to look into the past? Two of these stories struck me with special sharpness. In "The Quiet American," a thirty-something year old Jewish American, visiting Stuttgart for a professional conference, is bemused and then increasingly aggravated by a tour guide who cannot stop pointing out all the buildings that were bombed during the war. The polite American, who understands--perhaps too well--the protocols of being a good traveler, cannot bring herself to confront this tour guide and make the woman face the obvious: that the buildings were bombed as a result of a war that Germany itself brought on. Until relief comes from an unexpected source, the quiet American can do nothing but suffer, both from the tour guide's hammer-heavy myopia and from self-loathing at her own inability to act. Finally, in "Mispocha," the son of an immigrant couple that has always refused to discuss their lives in Germany and their early years in the United States decides to take matters into his own hands. He becomes active in various organizations dedicated to Jewish family research. He submits a DNA sample to a laboratory in hopes of learning more about his paternal ancestry. What he finds, however, shocks and befuddles him. He can think of no logical explanation for the results. But, as Dreifus shows us, an explanation is found, one that no one could have guessed at yet which reveals another small, sad corner of the holocaust legacy.

While Dreifus certainly makes use of her own family's history, and some of her own experiences in Quiet Americans, she has composed something that is even more profound and affecting than memoir, a book that makes an imaginative leap not just into the life of a single grandparent but several--even into the generation prior to her grandparents--and then forward into the generations that followed. Not quite a novel-in-stories--because the cast of characters, and the number of families involved, is wide indeed--Quiet Americans nonetheless has the historical perspective, the intuitive grasp over cause and effect, of a grand historical novel. But at the same time--and what I love most about the book--these gently narrated stories are incredibly intimate, sharply focused little gems. They reveal piece by piece, person by person, what a whole people and a whole country have yet to fully understand or overcome.