Fractions of Histories, Multiplying: On Nicole Krauss' "To Be a Man"

Nicole Krauss | To Be a Man: Stories | Harper | 2020 | 240 Pages

In “To Be A Man,” the title story of Nicole Krauss’s new story collection, a protagonist tells a friend that she has been recently bombarded by “the most astonishing stories.” “She was not aware of having asked for these intimate and staggering stories,” she tells him, “but maybe in her way she had been; maybe she had the look of someone who was trying to work something out, something at once vast and fleeting, which could never be approached head-on but only anecdotally.”

The protagonist—recently divorced, mother of two sons, bound to Israel—seems awfully reminiscent of Krauss herself, claiming a Rachel Cusk-ian bid for herself as a passive narrator. Yet even in this passive framing—stories somehow gravitate to Krauss from others, as if seeking their way to the world through her power of translation—she acknowledges the strength of her own role as translator: how her personal need to “work something out” might have instigated the confessions; how something within her, in “her way,” seeks a truth that can only be approached through narrative, and indeed, fragmented narrative.  

This felt presence of Krauss herself permeates To Be A Man, whose independent stories read as anything but independent. For past readers of Krauss, her trademark themes—her interest in the weight of Jewish heritage in a modern moment—permeate the book, despite it being her first published story collection. Although many of the stories had been published before, in Harper’s as well as The New Yorker, Krauss has gained acclaim primarily for her novels including Forest Dark and, most successfully, The History of Love—novels that share not only trademark interests but a very specific attention to form. Structurally, all drop the reader immediately into a highly tonal reality, abiding a character’s perspective so closely that a comedy is born of the strength of their tone—until the story switches entirely to a new perspective, then proceeds to bounce back and forth, entertaining while revealing nothing of their connection until the unrelated voices somehow weave together in a surprising and deeply rewarding way. 

While that form of building—the slow mounting, until all is revealed—seems exclusive to the novel, the anecdotal and unrelated story worlds of To Be a Man somehow achieve a similar effect. The stories seem to push the boundary of how many voices can reflect on each other, drawing each to their respective apex not by some intervention of plot, tying them all together with a bow, but rather through a growing exploration of how varied reflections of similar themes endlessly multiply one another, amassing a picture of something far larger than what any one perspective could yield. 

For if Krauss’s interest does lie in something “vast and fleeting,” as her “To Be a Man” protagonist claims, this collection seeks that expansiveness through her telltale style and interest. Tonally, the stories emerge in a blurry haze, as if the focus in their shot belongs to a backdrop of the past, of history and memory, that haunts the landscape despite being cropped from the final frame, leaving the nearby undefined and ungrounded. Indeed, Krauss’ world grounds itself in such a history-laden landscape right from the get-go, as the collection’s first story, “Switzerland,” begins by introducing a once-European Jewish family who have moved to Switzerland “for the best trauma care in the world.” This literal move, seeking the alleviation of trauma, reveals the conditions from which many of the stories’ characters suffer: the weight of a personal and cultural memory so acute that it haunts them no matter their desperate geographic bids at escape (with characters undertaking exoduses to Switzerland, Tel Aviv, Latin America, and Germany).

Together, these ten stories loosely chart the full cycle of a life, working through childhood, adolescence, and pregnancy, to losing parents and learning to parent oneself. Many of the stories hit notes of polar extremes around such events, as if stretching to an octave, like the coupling of a death and a bris in “Zusya on the Roof,” or a divorce and wedding in “End Days.” In both cases, the dissolution frames the former event, as if suggesting a similarity between events where bonds of humanity are formed and where they dissolve. Though the stories in To Be a Man move almost chronologically, their pairings offer a reminder of the inseparability of such milestones; the constant flow of stages backward and forward not only in one’s life but across generations.

If Krauss’ trademark privileging of the past works its way through these stories, it is enlivened by a new interest: flashes of the future. Like the fires burning in “End of Days” (“come hell or high water,” a character puts once, too aptly), the mysterious pandemic warning in “Future Emergencies,” or the never-explained refugee camps of “Amour” (all the more eerie for their references to an all-too recognizable New York), images of various dystopias introduce a forward-looking anxiety that penetrates and disturbs the general sense of a suffocatingly heavy past. Here, Krauss brings the personal anxieties of her characters—Noa in “End of Days,” navigating wildfires alongside her parents’ divorce; the protagonist of “Future Emergencies,” weighing her relationship alongside a (woefully prescient) pandemic-like scenario—into environmental realities and external events that amplify extant fears. Set in these crises, the stories introduce a new dimension to processing already-fraught realities—a move admirable, at the very least, for how it allows Krauss to apply her retrospective lens even to our present world, casting it in sepia, a new sort of history.

Despite the way in which past and future temporalities can seem to distract from the action of the stories, finding their weight through indirect means, these rotations of perspective—alongside cutting insights into psychology that Krauss sprinkles liberally across her work—create a gem of a collection, elevating the many merits of each individual story to a synergistic swirl of pleasure and beauty. As Krauss has noted across interviews, her interest in writing was born of a desire to live more lives than just the one she inhabits. Nowhere does this passion for multifarious experience, with all its vivacity, come through more clearly than in To Be a Man, a collection which will no doubt cement Krauss’s reputation as not only one of the prominent novelists of our time, but one of its most accomplished writers across forms.