Reading: A quick review of Great House

Nicole Krauss may be New York's most recent literary darling. And, while I can accept her as an anointed one, I am disappointed by Great House. A fan of her prose, I appreciated its ability to create a mood of profound solitude and birth characters like Alma and Leo Gorsky from The History of Love. Yet the voices of her four monotone narrators of Great House were barely distinguishable by gender or personality: all are privileged and well-traveled, and several are writer-poets (Nadia, Lotte, Daniel Varsky,..). The narrators' self-characterizations and visions of others reveal a tiresome knack for self-pity and self-absorption, which left me bereft of characters with whom I could wrestle or admire. Disappeared under Pinochet's regime, Daniel Varsky's character enjoyed a kind of immortality as did the nineteen-drawered desk. As one critic, Ron Charles from The Washington Post, wrote, "There's no denying the somber beauty of Krauss's prose, but in such a great house, one craves a wider spectrum of humanity."