Yet, all these signs of plot flame up only to sputter out. Both Nicole and Epstein travel to Israel in an attempt to reconnect with their familial pasts both stay in the Tel Aviv Hilton both are briefly conscripted by mysterious men on Zionist missions both get caught up in other artists’ creative projects. Split between alternating first- and third-person voices, the former characterized by the meandering intimacy of contemporary autofiction, the latter by close alignment with the perspective of Jules Epstein, a rich, aging lawyer - Krauss’s novel propels its protagonists toward somethings that also manage to be nothings. This contradictory desire - to use form to consider formlessness - is Forest Dark’s animating impulse. I wanted to employ them in a form that could contain the formless, so that it might be held close, as meaning is held close, and grappled with. I didn’t want to give them up - didn’t want to live without their consolation. In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray the more I wrote, the more suspect the good sense and studied beauty achieved by the mechanisms of narrative seemed to me. Though she has long practiced its art, she finds herself frustrated by its inability to capture what she terms “formlessness”:
EARLY IN Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss’s fourth and most inward-looking novel, one of its narrators - a successful Brooklyn novelist also named Nicole - meditates on the limits of fiction.
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