Nicole Krauss - Forest Dark

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I thought Nicole Krauss's Great House was excellent and I was looking forward to this very much.  Sadly, I thought Forest Dark was self-regardingly flashy and ultimately empty.

The book centres around two Jewish characters who are, in their different ways, having crises of identity and reassessing both their lives and their relationships with Israel and Judaism.  Jules Epstein is a hugely successful businessman who begins to give away his possessions and have a sort of holiday from being himself, while Nicole is a writer struggling with writer's block who leaves her family to…well…find herself wouldn't be an inappropriate cliché.  The two stories intercut with each other – although I don’t really know why, other than that it's the fashion at the moment.

There is a huge amount of intellectualising here, which would be fine by me if it made some sense or had real depth – but most of it doesn't.  I know a lot of professional critics think this is a brilliant masterpiece, but it just made me cross in the end and I'm glad that neither the characters nor the author (nor Kafka, come to that) could hear what I was saying about them because I was driven to some thoroughly reprehensible language as I was reading.  Leaving aside the almost invariably ghastly idea of a writer writing about a writer who is struggling to write and the undoubtedly postmodern something-or-other of naming the fictional writer after herself, Krauss goes in for a lot of what seemed to me to be show-off cleverness for its own sake – much of which isn't really clever at all. 

For example, there's a long passage where Nicole hears a radio broadcast about modern cosmology and then considers the nature of knowledge.  We get stuff like this: "But in a multiverse, the concepts of known and unknown are rendered useless, for everything is equally known and unknown," which, frankly, is unmitigated tosh.  Or: "In the end we have made ourselves ill with knowledge."  Really?  How have we done that, exactly?  I suspect that quite a few people who are alive because of modern medical knowledge might well have something to say on the matter.  Or "Now, we have little choice but to live in the arid fields of reason."  What, you really think *that* is the problem at the moment?  Allow me to present you with some alternative facts.  There's also a sort of variation on solipsism which sounds as though a hippy, still tripping on the acid they took at Woodstock, has been taken to see The Matrix and, having speculated that each of us, in our own mind, may create space itself and everything in it for ourselves, Nicole says "In that moment I knew unequivocally that if I was dreaming my life from anywhere, it was the Tel Aviv Hilton."  Er…that would be the Tel Aviv Hilton which only exists in your dream, would it?  And so on and so on.

I suspect that Krauss is trying to suggest that we have lost sight of the wonder of the unknown and the numinous, a view with which I have a good deal sympathy, but writing this sort of nonsense certainly doesn't make the case.  (And in my view, Eliot's "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" says much of it better in two brief sentences.)  I do realise that this is a novel and not a philosophical treatise, but in order to have any real content it  surely requires some semblance of rationality, or at least originality of imagery.  Much of this just read to me like someone trying to show off how clever they are and getting it embarrassingly wrong.

So, I'm afraid I hated Forest Dark.  There have been some very fine novels about identity in the modern world recently (including Jewish identity).  Salman Rushdie's The Golden House, David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar and even Will Self's Phone all spring to mind.  This doesn't begin to compare, I'm afraid.  Nicole Krauss can still write a good sentence and come up with an arresting image from time to time, but as a novel I thought this was very poor.  I'm sorry to have to say this about a writer whom I respect, but my advice is to avoid this book.