Great House

Like her acclaimed first novel, The History of Love, Nicole Krauss' latest effort, Great House, relates the history of a lost object through multiple narrators. Rather than a book, as in The History of Love, the lost object now is a desk, and while the earlier novel was told by a pair of charming and very different storytellers, Great House suffers from four monotonously unhappy narrators, three of whom are barely distinguishable. The reclusive ageing writer Nadia blends with the dejected Oxford student Isabel, who blends with the Oxford scholar Arthur; these three, along with the fiery Israeli Aaron, tell the story of how the desk changes hands over the course of several decades. Throughout Great House the losses are many: furniture, confidence, loved ones, and years fall away until Krauss' protagonists are so accustomed to loss that they're reduced to mere shadows. Krauss' writing charms, yet because the tone of Great House is so consistently despondent, the steady accumulation of tragedies fails to stir emotions or culminate in any sort of climax. Ultimately, Great House is best read not with the narrative expectations of a novel but as a series of wonderfully lyric sentences.