(Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated comes out this fall, and Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón-of Y Tu Mamá También-is already laboring on The History of Love.) It draws a career arc that may very soon surpass her husband’s, in book clubs (it’s a Today show pick) as well as Hollywood. Krauss’s novel is emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous, idea-driven but with indelible characters and true suspense. Old Leo (a new entry in the Jewish-lit canon) nurses the loss of his true love, as well as his only son-a famous writer-and his own great manuscript. More to the point, The History of Love is a significant novel, genuinely one of the year’s best. “God knows Foer is fond of those.”)Īdd to that Krauss’s own privileges: the isolated splendor of her Bauhaus childhood home on a Long Island hilltop a precocious and suspended career as a poet degrees from Stanford and Oxford a stint corralling literati for a hip reading series at the Russian Samovar that must have yielded lots of writerly connections.īut what of it? Authors through the ages have been well-off and well connected. Mediabistro declared them “obviously collaborative.” (“Is it a cute postmodern joke?” the piece went on. And there are the striking similarities between their two second novels, which few reviewers have failed to note. Then there is the multi-million-dollar brownstone on three lots that they just bought near Prospect Park (its ornate bathroom is featured on the snark blog Gawker). Their debuts were nestled side-by-side on year-end best-of lists in 2002 this year they could well be again. Put together, the power couple is easy to resent. Can you blame her? She’s living beside a lightning rod, whose alternately hyped-and-reviled second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, has attracted much Schadenfreude. She will, in fact, not utter his name within sight of a tape recorder. What about her husband, great-young-thing Jonathan Safran Foer? “That subject I’m not talking about,” she says firmly. “I don’t know what it’s like for other writers.” So I ask her how she feels about writers’ succeeding wildly the minute they’re out of the gate. Krauss got glowing reviews for her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, followed quickly by a six-figure, two-book deal. Her voice is barely audible as a hoary man in a yarmulke shouts, “Come on, when was the last time you saw a drunken Lubavitcher?” Krauss, in flared jeans and Saucony sneakers, is not just too young and modern for this crowd but too soft-spoken as well.
We’ve come to Grand Street in honor of Leo Gursky, the lonely octogenarian who anchors her intricate second novel, The History of Love. Amid the old-timers and stale knishes of Shalom Chai deli, Nicole Krauss makes an aloof, if amused, onlooker.
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