From Nicole Krauss, a dazzling yet cartwheeling novel
The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
Norton, 252 pp., $23.95
Leo Gursky, the dyspeptic semi-hero of Nicole Krauss's second novel, has seen enough of life to feel equivocal about his own. He spends most of his days in a New York flat, signaling his old friend Bruno, who lives upstairs, on the radiator pipes, or immersed in a half-secret writing life. Mostly, in contemplating his long and sometimes perilous past, he worries that he will die alone and (worse) unnoticed, so he tries to leave the building every day or two and make a little ruckus. Until he retired after his heart attack, Gursky was a locksmith by profession, a trade that he learned from his cousin when he came to America and that serves as a metaphor for his own escape from Poland during the Third Reich. ''Show me a Jew that survives," Leo's cousin told him, turning locks, ''and I'll show you a magician." Leo himself is a virtual Houdini, getting in and out of close quarters with slippery ease. But the greatest disappearing act of his life was against his will, in the summer of 1941, and it took him away from everything he loved.
As Leo would say, And yet. If his cantankerous, fiercely unpitying voice gives the novel its point of departure and much of its staying power, it is only a series of lights along a line of infinitely labyrinthine corridors. ''The History of Love" is actually several stories within one book, tales that don't so much connect as they do overlap and refract upon one another. There was the abandoned manuscript that Leo wrote in a village in Poland more than half a century ago, as well as the childhood sweetheart from whom he was separated. There was the son who, never knowing Leo was his real father, grew up to become a famous writer in New York. There is Alma, the fictional heroine of a novel called ''The History of Love," and Alma, the 14-year-old girl in Brooklyn who was named after her. This second Alma, the teenage, flesh-and-blood one, is the star of her own story, playing counterpoint to Leo's; she has a slightly deranged little brother, Bird, who believes he is destined to be a Jewish holy man, and a widowed mother whom Alma is trying to fix up. Mom works as a translator, and one day a stranger writes to ask if she might be willing to translate an obscure novel that changed his life. The book was written in Spanish by a man named Zvi Litvinoff, a Polish exile who immigrated to Chile, and its title, of course, is ''The History of Love."
If all this sounds mind-bending or irritating, it is a little of both. Not because Krauss has failed at setting up her Borges-like hall of mirrors -- technically, she has succeeded finely -- but because the heart of the story has been sacrificed to its pyrotechnics. Novels within novels, almost by necessity, are in competition with each other, with the reader being forced to relinquish one set of feelings for another every time the narrative shifts. So if one marvels at the acrobatics involved in, say, Leo's old manuscript appearing in a way that will inform Alma the girl's life, we are nonetheless left feeling shortchanged by all the flash and dazzle. It is hard to summon much sympathetic anguish for Alma and her family -- the father died of pancreatic cancer -- when we know, can't help knowing, that the character exists as a foil for Leo's novel, for Krauss's metafiction, for the thematic centerpiece of Litvinoff's hidden tome.
''The History of Love" -- Krauss's -- is replete with subplots that are accomplished and intelligent: riffs on Jewish mysticism, anthropology, the transcendent power of narrative. We are privy to enough passages in Litvinoff's esoteric story to realize it is an ode to love and its vast territories of misunderstanding: There were, in days past, such eras as the Age of Silence (when gestures did the job of speech) and the Age of Glass (an ''evolutionary corrective" that fostered compassion). Alma the teenager escapes the mundanity and sadness of her life by poring through books like ''Edible Plants and Flowers in North America," keeping track of the numbers of species dying off per year, and starting her own secret narrative: ''How to Survive in the Wild."
Eventually Alma begins an expedition for which there is no guide, searching for the girl who inspired the character who inspired her name -- the first Alma, in other words, born in some Polish village light-years away. So this Alma's path will begin to parallel that of Leo, who, through a series of craftily imposed revelations, begins to sense that all of his past is not lost after all. Like those difficult but well-oiled locks of Leo's cousin, Krauss's novel begins to slide into place, so that the last quarter of the novel has a thrilling sense of inevitability. The final pages of the novel contain a discovery so lovely, so poignant and right and ultimately illuminative, that I was almost willing to forgive her every coy, clever cartwheel in the book.
But, à la Leo again, Almost. ''The History of Love" employs several experimental techniques (though these days they're no longer experimental): cross-cutting narratives, all-cap subtitles that explain the story, rabbit-hat tricks, wispy symbols that jump plots to reappear. In a graduate thesis in creative writing, perhaps this is laudatory and even brilliant. In a novel, it speaks to a rarefied form, unless the story itself carries enough weight to bear its accoutrements. The problem with this sort of artifice is the same as with the old pyramid scheme -- it seems fabulous until you realize someone has to pay at the end. What pays here is the emotional center of the novel, concealed and outshone by Krauss's shell game.
At a crucial point in the novel, at the end of an exquisite internal riff, Leo says, about sitting in a room alone, ''Aside from myself, there was no sign of me." There are plenty of beautiful moments in ''The History of Love," and that's one of them. I wish Krauss had simplified the stage set enough to give the real magic in her novel free rein.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.See ''Bookings," Page K8, for information on a local appearance by Nicole Krauss.
