My History with The History of Love
By SANFORD PINSKER
I take the High Holidays
seriously, especially the parts having to do with moral bookkeeping and pleas
for forgiveness. Most of what I confessed on Rosh Hashanah was personal, and I
then used the 10 days until Yom Kippur to rectify what I have done wrong. All
this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the piece that follows, for
what I intend to do here is ask my readers to “forgive” me for over-praising a
novel that I now regard as problematic.
Let me explain. At one point in the High Holiday service we thump our chests as
a litany of sins is recited. One of them is loshon hora, speaking ill about somebody. It’s a
serious sin which goes from idle gossip, its mildest form, to vitriol that
borders on character assassination. By contrast, we are not enjoined to ask
forgiveness for over-praising, nor is
there an idiomatic Hebrew or Yiddish phrase that would be the opposite of loshon hora. Why so? Because Yiddish culture
has more words for “complaint” than for praise, and more important, because
superstition held that anything praised too much would attract the attention of
the evil eye. Hence, the origin of Yiddish grandmothers proclaiming “I have, kein a-hora [May the evil eye avoid
them], seven grandchildren. “
As a reviewer I am asked to make recommendations about what books my readers
should read. This makes me, perforce, a taste-maker, or more correctly an
endlessly whirring cog in the taste-making machinery. No matter that deadlines
make it nearly impossible for reviewers to reread, much less have time to mull
over, the novels they’re writing about. Full-time reviewers do the best they
can, and there are times when a sober rereading/reconsideration suggests that
their initial response was well off the mark.
The previous paragraph nicely describes what happened when I reviewed Nichole
Krauss’s The History of Love. With
the notable exceptions of Ruth Franklin and James Wood, most reviewers,
including me, slathered the book with praise. For some, the novel’s dazzling
postmodernist effects made it special; for others, it was the way that love
triumphed when the strings of its intricate plot were pulled together. But
these bouquets thrown at Krauss were nothing compared to some over-the-top
assessments. Writing for “Mostly Fiction Book Reviews,” Jana Perkins nominated
Krauss for very special attention: “One of the characters in The History of Love believes certain
dead writers should received posthumous Nobels. Never mind posthumous, I think
Nichole Krauss deserves the award now.”
Like many other reviewers, I felt that attention should be paid to what I
called Krauss’ “Jewish magical realism” (others rightly ticked off the
influence of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster)
as well as to a novel that I claimed packed “enough narrative energy to carry
readers into the past and around the world.” No doubt that sentence, the
review’s final one as it turned out, smacks more of “book blurb” than book
review, but this isn’t the sin I worry about. What I failed to mention is how
manipulative the book is (I know, I know, all
fiction is manipulative; when a novel begins, “John slammed the door and left
his wife Dora sobbing on the sofa,” it is well to remember that there really is
no John, no Dora, no sofa, and no door. ) But there is manipulation and manipulation, and in the case of Krauss’
fiction, too much of “what happens (improbably) next” is inextricably tied to
the novel’s overarching sentimentality.
To my credit, I did mention these matters in passing. I pointed out, for
example, that Krauss’ “fast-and-loose presentation of pre-War Poland and how
the night and fog of the Holocaust moved across Europe is particularly
disturbing” and that Krauss’s novel is “manipulative and sentimental.” What I
didn’t do, however, is emphasize these points strongly enough.
I do not agree with Theodor Adorno, who once proposed the idea that there
should be no more poetry, and by extension, no more literature, after
Auschwitz. We have seen powerful examples of Holocaust memoir and Holocaust fiction. Indeed, I vividly remember
the late Irving Howe telling me that there are never too many Holocaust memoirs: “They should stretch from the
floor to the ceiling.”
Others are not so convinced, arguing that all memoirs, indeed, all memories, are problematic. They prefer
the rigor of Holocaust scholarship. And as for Holocaust fiction, the scholar
Alvin Rosenfeld speaks for many when he dismisses most, if not all, Holocaust
fiction as not worth his time and more important, likely to cause more harm
than good.
Long ago I expressed the conviction that Holocaust fiction gets no free passes;
as literature, it must walk like literature and talk like literature. My
problem with The History of Love is
that I didn’t have the space to talk about Krauss’ use (and sometimes, factual misuse of history), deciding, instead,
to comment on her style and how much it had changed since her first novel, A Man Walks Into a Room. In much the
same way that Leo Gursky, Holocaust survivor and New York City oddity, is
largely a cliché, so too is the all-too-adorable 14-year-old Alma who is working
on a manuscript entitled How I Survived
in the Wild: Volume Three. If Gursky reminds us of I. B. Singer, Alma
reminds us of J. D. Salinger and his precocious Glass family.
Unfortunately, all this didn’t occur to me until I had a long stretch of time
to take some cultural bookkeeping about how and why books such as The History of Love became so popular.
Part of reason is buzz, and if I had to portion off a few moments during Yom
Kippur to ask forgiveness for reviewing sins, I would have begun with the over-praise
I ladled out to Krauss’s novel. But the unvarnished truth is that I have too
many other, much larger sins, to pack into a short space. Besides, as a person
who reviews armloads of books, I have no doubt that I will commit similar
missteps in the future. But unlike the Krauss novel, I may not have a chance to
‘fess up to my shortcomings in public.