Attention must be paid.

THE HISTORY OF LOVE

BY NICOLE KRAUSS 

NEW YORK: NORTON, 320 PAGES, $24.

A successful first novel is a hard act to follow. The writer, whose first book was composed in utter privacy, now has a public to please and critics to answer to. As a consequence, many second novels suffer in one way or another from lack of nerve. No so with Nicole Krauss's History of Love; in scope and depth it fearlessly outpaces Man Walks into a Room, her estimable debut. That book--praised by many, including Susan Sontag--concerned a man who loses all memory of his adult life and then embraces his new blankness, rejecting even his wife, who remembers the person he used to be. And in it, Krauss demonstrated an eye for evocative detail and a sharp wit that made a virtue of restraint.

The History of Love, by contrast, is emotionally direct. Brilliantly told, the novel serves as a reminder that accessibility need not mean dumbing down. Love is its subject: the urge to know and make oneself known, and to do so, as well, through the act of writing.

The book opens with the voice of Leo Gursky: "When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT." Though only one of three protagonists, whose stories are gradually braided together, Leo is the central character, and his voice--passionate, skeptical, hilarious--reverberates throughout the work, making his presence felt even when he's offstage. Leo's life, we learn, has been full of sorrow. As a young man in Poland he wanted to be a writer. "I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely," he says. He was writing a novel about the woman he loved when her family shipped her off to America. He sent her portions of the novel by mail. Then the Nazis came; he escaped by hiding out in forests and potato cellars, eating rats raw when he was hungry enough. He lost his desire to describe and believed his novel to be lost as well. By the time he made his way to New York, the woman he loved had married someone else. She told him he had a son who didn't know he existed. He worked as a locksmith and tried to make himself invisible.

An old man now, Leo doesn't want to die alone, so he goes out into the world and does small things to be noticed. "I'll buy a juice even though I'm not thirsty. If the store is crowded I'll even go so far as dropping my change all over the floor." Knowing his time is short, Leo lets nothing escape his attention; the world and everything in it, himself included, serve as his entertainment, his sustenance--and his material. He has written a second novel, and one day he wraps it in brown paper and mails it to his son, Isaac, who is now a famous writer, and whose life and career Leo has followed from afar.

Enter Alma, a precocious young Brooklyn teenager who keeps a journal written in prose of childlike clarity. Like Leo, Alma pays attention; she is young enough to love the world wholeheartedly. Her father is dead and she worries a lot--about her mother's happiness; about the sanity of her younger brother, who thinks he's the Messiah; about her own future. Then a letter arrives from a mysterious man, asking Alma's mother to translate from Spanish an obscure novel by Zvi Litvinoff called The History of Love. Alma, who as it happens was named after the heroine of the novel, begins to do some detective work.

Leo goes to his son's house in Connecticut to retrieve the manuscript he sent, taking a taxi from the train station: "A white house came into view. A little wind was chasing the clouds. Between the branches, I saw a lake. I'd imagined his place many times. But never with a lake. The oversight pained me." The old man lets himself in; as he explores the house--opening the refrigerator and the medicine cabinet, sitting at the typewriter, conjuring the son he never knew--the effect is devastating.

Cut to Chile, some years earlier, where Litvinoff, an immigrant Polish intellectual, is translating the novel The History of Love from Yiddish into Spanish, giving the pages day by day to his wife, who is the one who insisted he publish it. The gradually revealed connections between Leo's world and Alma's and Zvi's are complex, and the urge to unravel them creates a powerful momentum. Yet for all its verbal and emotional heat, the narrative is constructed with cinematic precision.

Still, there are flourishes: pages with one line of text on them, and excerpts from the novel within the novel, presented for their own sake. With titles such as "The Birth of Feeling" and "The Age of Silence," these selections verge on the excessively whimsical--but they are attempts to say what it means to be human, and more often than not they succeed. For an example, one passage describes the protagonist kissing Alma for the second time. "He ran his fingers down her spine over her thin blouse ... grateful for the world, which purposefully puts divisions in place so that we can over-come them, feeling the joy of getting closer, even if deep down we can never forget the sadness of our insurmountable differences."

In another passage, Krauss refers to "the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts." Then how, we might ask, are mere humans to live? Leo is saved by his capacity to address the world in spite of its cruelties. Alma, at fourteen, has the perspective, and exhibits the peculiar joy, of a practiced observer. Litvinoff lives by the word. And Krauss provides an answer by her own example. Give the world your attention. Attention is another way of saying love.

Maggie Paley is the author of the novel Bad Manners (Crown, 1986): the nonfiction study. The Book of the Penis (Grove, 1999); and Elephant (Groundwater Press, 1990), a chapbook of sestinas.