I begin my novels without ideas. I don't have a plot, or themes, or a sense of the book's form. Often I don't even have a specific character in mind. I begin with a single sentence of no great importance; it almost certainly will be thrown away later. To that sentence I add another, and then another. A little riff emerges. If it's going well--and it's hard for me to say exactly what going well means, beyond the writing feeling authentic enough not to require immediate erasure--I'll continue this sort of aimless unspooling. If I'm lucky, as the paragraphs accumulate, a compelling voice will emerge. Though often I will write twenty or thirty pages before I realize that in fact the voice lacks what might be called the "Pinocchio" element: the chance of becoming truly alive and "real."

It's unnerving not to know what I'm writing, or why, or where it will go. Scary, even, as time passes, and more and more work accumulates without an accompanying sense of clarity. A hundred or even two hundred pages in, and I am more lost than ever.I find myself worrying constantly that the work will fail. In my last novel, The History of Love, the potential of that failure became, itself, a theme of the novel--one of the main characters, Leo Gursky, is a failed writer.

Great House is my third novel, and so when I began it I already had some sense of what my writing process would be like. Yet my uncertainty was more acute than ever. The starting points I chose, which I knew would have to converge and cohere, were almost impossibly remote from one another. From out of all the early writing, four voices emerged, each with its own story: an American writer, Nadia, who has been writing for twenty-seven years at a desk she inherited from a Chilean poet who later disappeared; an overbearing Israeli father addressing his estranged son who has returned home after decades abroad; a retired Oxford don, who, in the final years of his wife's life, discovers a secret she kept from him all their marriage; and a young American woman who tells the story of a Hungarian antiques dealer and his two adult children, whom she comes to live with in a darkly magical Victorian house in London. I had four different paths, and all I knew was that 1) I wanted to understand who these people were and what had made them that way, and 2) woven together, their stories could make a solid and intricate whole, that their juxtaposition would reveal patterns, and form a complete architecture--even, or especially, if I couldn't anticipate that architecture. I was building a house--a city--without a blueprint.

Over time, the willful uncertainty I held myself to as I wrote shifted from being my process to my material. I suppose one can't occupy a position of doubt for a long time without beginning to think deeply about what it means to live in doubt: intellectual or moral doubt, self-doubt, or, perhaps most profoundly to me, the doubt that comes with a realization of the limits of how fully known we can ever be to another. The doubt I felt about the viability of the novel I was trying to write and my own abilities as a writer made me sensitive to the uncertainties of my characters. The writer, Nadia, becomes unraveled by the doubt she feels about her choice to sacrifice everything for her art, and about her lifelong sense of being somehow chosen--What if I had been wrong? is the question that afflicts her. For Arthur, the retired Oxford don, it's the uncertainty he felt for the almost half century of his marriage to Lotte, the sense of having been married to a mystery, which becomes more acute when after her death he discovers a secret she kept from him. For Aaron, the Israeli father, it's a moral doubt about the kind of father he was, aggravated by the fact that his son is a judge, and the uncertainty he feels toward a son he was never able to understand. And for the Weisz family, guarded by a controlling patriarch who survived the Holocaust, it's the uncertainty of never being able to trust others, as well as the untrustworthiness of a reliable home.

This doubt--this inability to know for sure--also became critical to the book's structure. Because I never knew what would happen next, and was held in a constant state of doubt, the very architecture of the book formed around, and came to depend on, the uncertainty of the reader. How will these stories fit together? What will be uncovered about the characters' lives, and what must necessarily remain unknown? The novel, which was a mystery to its author for so long, will be a kind of mystery for its readers, too. But in the process of solving it--at least those parts that have a solution--the reader is asked to dwell for some time in the shadow of uncertainty, to feel what it is to make a life there.

I’m always surprised by your novels, the simultaneous subtlety and emotional power of your prose. What were you reading while you were working on Great House?

Nicole Krauss: It was two and a half years of work, so there was a lot of reading. I know there are novelists who don’t like to read as they’re writing because it will direct them or, God forbid, influence them. But I’m the opposite, I love to read always. I find reading is like opening a faucet to the great streams of language come pouring out and splash around in your mind for the rest of the day or week. I find it incredibly helpful to have a ready flow of great language. For the past few years I read a lot of Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian writer. I read a lot of Roberto Bolano, who I discovered in 2003 when I read the first book that was translated here in America, By Night in Chile. He’s one of those writers who absolutely changed everything for me. I love Sebald, and he’s a writer I return to a lot. Perhaps my favorite is Beckett. I re-read a lot of his novels. I’m constantly reading new work or books that are new to me, but I tend to go back and re-read sections of books I love while I’m writing to remind me of what’s possible.

I know you used to write poetry. Do you still write poetry?

NK: I haven’t since I wrote the first words of my first novel. It’s an ongoing point of curiosity for me. When I was growing up as a teenager and all through college my great ambition in life was to be a poet and I couldn’t have possibly imagined that I would have fallen from the grace of poetry into the prosaic world of novels. I read and loved novels of course, I majored in literature, but it wasn’t my intention at all. It came as a surprise that I became a novelist and that I stopped writing poetry. I feel that someday there will be a return to it. I always say I need to be older and wiser but I don’t know if that’s true anymore, because the novel as a form fits me very well; the formlessness and elasticity of it, the fact that it doesn’t have a real definition. It’s the work of a novelist every time she sits down to write one.

But how is that different from poetry?

NK: I think with poetry the form is much more apparent and clear going out. You’ll have stanzas and line breaks; there is a certain attentiveness and clarity about formal tradition that novels don’t have. When you think about novels, all you can really say about them is that they’re long. They begin, and they end. The prose usually covers the pages, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s very unclear what a novel wants to be. It’s kind of amazing that it doesn’t paralyze us setting out because the possibilities are so vast.

But when you say you stopped writing poetry the moment you wrote the first lines of your first novel—what possessed you to start writing a novel in the first place, when you previously identified so strongly with poetry?

NK: I had reached a point where I felt ensnared by my own anxiety about writing poetry. I had had some mentors in college, most importantly to me Joseph Brodsky who is a real formalist and really insisted on being able to master as fully as possible formal verse before moving on. Seems like an obvious thing: you have to know what you are being free from if you’re going to write free verse. I followed that and at a certain point all of the great freedom that writing is meant to offer the writer somehow got lost for me, or was no longer accessible. I felt my poems were getting shorter and smaller and more airless. I knew in order to save the enterprise for myself I had to break a hole in my work where air could flood back in. I thought, what would it be like to write a novel? What is a novel, can I get to the end of it? I’m just going to see. It was more, what would the novel I wrote be like, and can I do it, even? I found very quickly that I just absolutely felt at home in the form, for this new freedom that returned to me and also the length of the project, the messiness of it, the necessary and integral imperfection of all novels really suited me. I liked the fact that novels can’t be perfect, and I feel that poetry can be. I don’t even think a novel aspires to perfection. It’s just too large to define. I felt at home there, and I still do.

Was that a daunting task for you? Endeavoring to write a novel understanding that there is no set definition for what you’re trying to do?

NK: I don’t know if I understood that yet. I read a million of them but you think differently when you try to write one. I think that realization came later. I can’t quite remember. It was daunting because how does one even write a novel? It’s an odd thing to try to do, and it seemed impossible. I wasn’t at all convinced that I could do it. Would I be able to get to the end, or think of a story sufficiently long enough or interesting enough? The first book, which I didn’t intend to publish, was just a question of being able to get from the beginning to the end. After that was when I sat down and thought, I really want to do this. But now the question is, what kind of novels do I want to write? I began trying to answer that in The History of Love.

The characters in Great House who are writers, Nadia, Lotte and Dovik, use writing as a means of retreat, as a way of distancing themselves from those around them. You talked about your relationship to form—novels, poetry—but what is your relationship to writing? In short, why do you write?

NK: I’m not sure I would describe their reasons for writing that way. I think what was interesting to me is the question of, what is the cost of writing? One begins to write and very soon you realize that there are things required of you, there are things you have to do and that involves solitude and a degree of remove, in order to simply have perspective on life, your relationships, the relationships of others. If you weren’t already you become an observer, and it’s very demanding in terms of a kind of willfulness you need to sustain. I was thinking about the costs of that.

But in these characters, writing is a way of not giving everything away, of keeping something to yourself, that is just yours.

NK: Absolutely, absolutely. I think what’s so interesting is, to what degree do writers have great recesses, and maybe secret recesses, that they guard in a certain way and preserve for their work, that they don’t allow to keel over into their normal lives and keep from their most intimate ones? In terms of what writing means to me is to return to the idea of freedom. As the years pass in my life, the rest of my life becomes filled up with the responsibilities of being a parent and having a family. The freedom that writing affords me is thrilling. As difficult and sometimes miserable, as hard as it can be on one’s confidence and sense of purpose, this sense of being able to sit down and potentially go anywhere and say anything; to put yourself in a position where you can get lost and enter the unknown, and put yourself up against very difficult things to discover who you are, what you’re made of, how you think about things. Again, what is the nature of life and human existence? It’s this incredible freedom that is impossible to find elsewhere in life. It’s kind of an enormous thing for me. The other thing is a sense of being able to create meaning. It seems like a bland and cliché thing to say but I find the disorganized chaos of life is not ultimately satisfying, and one wants to make out of that some solid thing. I don’t think it’s an accident that my books end up, though I never intend setting out, having a highly-wrought architecture in the way that I chose different voices and weave them together. There are echoes, thematic symmetries, it becomes, at least when I’m thinking about it, solid architecturally. It’s that sense of solid form that’s very satisfying to me because it seems like it will stand on its own after I walk away, and that all of life’s experiences can actually come to something

What are the costs, then?

NK: It’s hard to distinguish them from a personality type who often becomes a writer, and I probably fit that mold. Is one a naturally solitary and somewhat removed person and one naturally migrates towards writing because it’s an opportunity to express oneself clearly and communicate in a way that is difficult, or the other way around? I don’t know because I’ve been writing since I’m, like, 14. I think my personality has been largely formed around that work, and I was just like that since I was very young. My whole life I’ve been acutely sensitive to the divide between who we are and who we are able to bring to the surface of our lives to show to other people even those closest to us. I find that incredibly painful, from your average cocktail party to even a nice dinner party to familial relationships. The only place I find release from that is children. In children, you don’t have that sense of divide. There’s a kind of wholeness between you and them.

You talked about how a novel itself is inherently a challenge and Great House is somewhat experimental in form. You drift seamlessly between a series of very different and emotionally complicated narrators who serve as the keepers of the story. How do a series of stories become a novel? Where do you begin crafting the story, and what are some challenges associated with creating so many distinct voices?

NK: It seems to be emerging to me that this is a way of writing I’m very much drawn to.  I’m attracted to beginning these stories in very remote places and moving them towards each other. In The History of Love I had three distinct storylines—Leo Gursky, Alma and the book within a book—and there, it was slightly more obvious. I wrote it in the order that you read it so I was always held in suspense: For the longest time I didn’t know how it was going to end. There was an old man, a young girl and they were going to be drawn to each other through this third story of a lost book. I was setting out to write the book that would become Great House, and I was less and less interested in concrete connection. I was much more interested in what happens if you start in very remote places and don’t aim for a concrete connection. Yes, the novel will only be interesting to me and anyone else if it absolutely holds together and is fused at some point, that these parts standing on their own would be nothing compared to what they are when they reflect and echo off each other. It’s sounding very abstract, and it is. I wrote a lot for a long time, different voices. A couple of them disappeared and I kept four. A lot of the pages got thrown away—they didn’t develop in authentic enough ways so there was a lot of aimless wandering for a long time until there was a bristling effect, where the character stands up and you know they’re alive. I was much more interested in what happens if you try to make a book where these connections, echoes, symmetries, these convergences are oblique and subtle. I wanted to hold them at a distance from each other. I was interested in that tension. At a certain point I depended on my uncertainty as a writer. I think in order to discover and go places you haven’t been before you can’t know the outcome. I write simply not knowing. That doubt and uncertainty of my capabilities as a writer and the possibility of this novel failing began to seep into the work. At a certain point, it had to shift from process to material. The characters are riddled with that uncertainty and doubt. Like Arthur’s doubt about being married to this mystery, this woman he didn’t really know. Or the Weiss children’s inability to trust others or believe in the possibility of a permanent home. Or the doubt of the Israeli father about what kind of father he was. It’s filled with intellectual and moral doubt and self-doubt. Most profoundly to me, this doubt about how fully known we can ever really be to each other, that distance between who we are and how much of ourselves we are  able to ever communicate or expose to others. Then it became the characters’ uncertainty. Then, there’s a third level of the readers’ uncertainty. If the writer is uncertain of herself then the readers will be skeptical and that became interesting to me. For all this uncertainty to be mirrored in the reader, for her, the reader, to have to be held in doubt and to think about this idea of what it is to make one’s life in the shadow of uncertainty?

The four narrators: they are all so different but have certain similarities. Can you explain in more concrete terms where these characters came from?

NK: I always think there is a too-little-noted distinction between the autobiographical and the personal. I don’t write anything autobiographical, which means the characters really don’t come from anyone I’ve met, or even people I’ve observed, in my own life. They’re really complete inventions on every level. But, having said that, one of the most important things to me as a writer is that my work feels very authentic to me, and in order for it to be authentic, it has to be personal. The stakes have to be high. What does that mean? It means that you are inventing these lives and voices into which you can pour very deeply felt and personal feelings and thoughts. Not always your own, sometimes it’s an empathy for what it might be like in a certain situation. Some of the characters evolve in strange and accidental ways. Arthur and Lotte: I lived in England for awhile, and I used to live near Hampstead Heath and I used to always walk by these bathing ponds. I walked in the Heath every day. It was a melancholy time in my life. It was this landscape onto which I projected all of that and all these years later I find myself mentally revisiting them. I wanted to write about them, I didn’t know what, but there was something atmospheric I wanted to write about. This character was born who walks his wife to the pond every day. There was no story, just that scene. And I began to write more it became interesting to me. I sometimes use small details from life. For example, my grandmother is absolutely nothing like Lotte but she was a chaperone on a kindertransport. They are small, sketchy elements of life that allow me to invent these characters and pour all kinds of things into them. They were born, and as I was writing, it became clear to me that this swimming hole is a metaphor for Arthur, that he couldn’t follow his wife. She disappeared into this abyss where he couldn’t go, and that was somehow a metaphor for her mystery, her unknown quality. Their whole relationship was born out of that. For Weiss, the antique dealer, I became obsessed with the idea of a transplanted room. I think that came from two sources. One is the Freud house, where I did spend a lot of time myself, and that room is just so amazing. It’s reassembled for the last final year of his life, moved from Vienna to London. And there is Francis Bacon, the painter’s studio. After he died it was broken down into ten thousand pieces and moved piece by piece and resurrected in Dublin in a gallery. It was fascinating to me: Why would that happen, and why are people compelled to consider these things? So this idea of a room that is deconstructed in one place and reconstructed elsewhere became the source for thought.

A lot of the language you use to describe the characters in the book evokes the image of houses—doors being opened and doors being closed, secrets, hiding places, isolation, discovery, the notion of interior and exterior. What is it that compels you about structures?

NK: I was aware at a certain point that there were these houses in the book. I thought about the connection between walking through a house and walking through a mind. I was exploring their remembering minds. I was aware of houses, rooms, doors, but I didn’t think of that as an overarching rubber band until the very end when I thought about that Ben Zakkai story and something snapped in place. Structure is always an interesting subject when it comes to writing because in order to do it you have to be aware and unaware at the same time. For example: the desk in the book. I actually wrote the first half of the first chapter as a short story called From the Desk of Daniel Varsky. I published it in Harper’s in 2007. It was collected in Best American Short Stories, and when you’re in that anthology they ask you to write a paragraph explaining it. I sat down at my desk and tried to figure out why I wrote that story and it dawned on me that the desk I write at is awfully like the one in the story. Hugely dominating—it goes up one wall and has lots of drawers and shelves, and it’s absolutely enormous. More than that, I inherited it from the previous owner of the house who had it built to his esoteric specifications. I’ve never liked the desk. I’ve always thought, it’s this imposing thing that I’d like to do away with but I don’t know how. It would have to be chopped up to even get down the stairs and it seemed sad to me, to waste this desk. When the former owner left, he had the desk built around this painted panel that I guess was valuable to him, so he had it removed. So, there’s a gaping hole under which I work, and I realized this desk had always been a burden and responsibility to me. Then I realized that this story is actually about the burden of inheritance. I had written the story without really realizing I had written it about my own desk. You don’t know, but you know.

I was actually going to ask you, when Weiss says: “to call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always posed to offer up its back for its owner to make use of…” Of course, in Great House, the desk represents so much more—family, the power of memory—but the story is, in fact, anchored around an object. Is there an object in your life that carries significant weight?

NK: I certainly am somebody who is attached to objects that come down to me from grandparents or the old world. I have things like that, small things; A German-English dictionary that my grandfather gave my grandmother when they first met in 1940. I don’t think about them a lot, but the desk is interesting because it’s my life. On a certain level I do sort of despise it. The drawers fly open because the floor is sloped. It does, in a way, have a life of its own and I’ve agreed to let it have a life of its own, imbued it with meaning that I’ve put upon it.

The themes of this novel, in my opinion, are very Jewish in nature: pain, memory, inheritance, burden, family, history, discovery. Even the title itself, Great House, a school of thinking designed to “turn Jarusalem into an idea. Turn the Temple into a book. Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form.” Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to Judaism, and to Israel, and how it has shaped you as a writer and influenced you as a person?

NK: Every writer is born into and also grows and arrives at her own material, and it became apparent to me pretty quickly as I was becoming a novelist that there’s something about Judaism that is contradictory and argumentative, which I find deeply useful as a way of thinking about the world, and therefore something to infuse my writing with. Being born into all of the complications of being a Jew, the beauties and complications, is a tremendous gift as a writer. I won’t always use those gifts but I’m lucky to have them. With this book, it wasn’t an overly conscious decision, but again this notion of doubt and uncertainty. Judaism is extraordinary in that it allows for and even encourages doubt; in the Talmudic tradition an argument that is refuted is considered a failure. The idea is to keep the argument or idea aloft for as long as possible and continue to peel it and peel it and dice it and get to the heart of it, but continue the questioning. That intellectual restlessness and inability to accept things as they seem or as they are is what makes the religion, to me, so incredibly powerful and intellectually interesting. It trickled down without me fully knowing it.

What’s next for you?

NK: I’ve been writing a lot of short pieces but in the back of my mind thinking about a new novel. Some of these characters are still enough alive in me. For example, Dov. I thought I’d write his story in this novel; the idea of a fallen judge who has somehow compromised himself morally, and finds himself in the position of then being judged. Part of me wants to know who he is and what he has to say. Sometimes the moment passes, and once the book is published there might be an unfortunate but necessary emotional distance. But, we’ll see.

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: Congratulations on the National Book Award nominations. Did you anticipate that happening?

NICOLE KRAUSS: How does one anticipate something like that?

BOLLEN: I don't know. Maybe you just wonder when you discover you're getting strong reviews.

KRAUSS: I didn't wonder, actually. It was a total surprise. They called me directly a couple of days before they announced it and I wasn't allowed to tell anyone—not even my publisher.

BOLLEN: Great House is a jigsaw of various plots and storylines. How did you piece it together?

KRAUSS: This is my third novel, so I'm getting a sense of my assets as a writer, although I imagine that will change over time. But I really like starting with these fragmented parts—using different voices without any sense at all when their connections will be. I don't have it all mapped out ahead of time. They are just characters and stories formed out of my mind and I have to discover the coherence among them. Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover these symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first. I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But, yes, at first it's sometimes like it's like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

BOLLEN: So you write from a place of uncertainty, not knowing yourself exactly where you are going or where it will end.

KRAUSS: Sometimes uncertainty extends all the way through to the end of the book. That was the case when I was writing The History of Love, too. But it was even more acute with Great House, because I chose a more complex set of stories and characters. And I wasn't interested in easy connections. I was drawn to establishing a distance and tension between them, a galaxy where the bodies are all moving according to the same force.

BOLLEN: I'm always curious about how much a writer can leave unanswered for the reader. In that sense a novel could be the opposite of a murder mystery where the entire work begs for a resolution. How do you decide, "OK, that's enough of a connection"? Or, "Wait a minute, that is completely vague and no one is going to get this at all"?

KRAUSS: I think it was Chekhov who once made the distinction between making a clear presentation of the problem and offering a solution to the problem. For him, it is only the former that is the writer's responsibility. I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close. But I don't think it's required to tie things up.

BOLLEN: When you started on the road that led to Great House, did you begin with one character or did you jump around?

KRAUSS: I was writing them simultaneously. On different days I would work on different sections and sometimes I would get really absorbed into one voice and I would write that for some months, come to a close, and then open another back up again. What interests me very much as a writer is the ability for writing to have our lives to be occupied so vividly by others. I think that's what we long for as writers and that's the unique thing that literature provides: To be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

BOLLEN: So what about the desk? How did it become the sun for all the revolving planets in Great House?

KRAUSS: In an effort to describe [this book] in a few paragraphs for the jacket copy, we found that there was no way to do it without the desk. Frankly, I don't think of the desk as the central pillar of this book. It's reductive. It is one of many joints. A main one but not the only one—and it doesn't connect all the stories. The desk first appeared in a short story I write called "From the Desk of Daniel Varsky." When that story was collected in an anthology, I was asked to write a small paragraph about the inspiration of the desk. I went up to my own office on the top floor of my house and sat at my desk and started at it, thinking. Naturally I looked at my own desk and had this moment where I suddenly realized—with shock—"Oh, my God. I was writing about something that comes directly from my own life that I was blind to when I wrote it." The desk I write at is very much like the one in the story.

BOLLEN: Really?

KRAUSS: It doesn't have 19 drawers, but it has many, and it has a vertical wall that rises up from the desktop of shelves and drawers. And in the story Nadia inherited her desk from a poet from her childhood. Far less romantically, I inherited my desk from the former owner of my house. He had it built into the room to his specifications. It's an overbearing piece of furniture and I've never liked it. It's masculine. If I could, I would get rid of it, but to do so you'd need to chop it up to get it downstairs. I live in a very narrow house with lots of stairs. 

BOLLEN: Was the former owner a writer?

KRAUSS: No. He wasn't.

BOLLEN: Why did he have a desk in an attic?

KRAUSS: In his spare time, he made music, and that was his room to do it. The story gets weirder because he built the desk around this painted panel, which, I guess, was valuable to him because when he left the house he removed this panel. So now there's this gaping hole above my head when I work. I've never known how to fill that hole, yet I keep writing at this desk, which I could have gotten rid of. When I was writing this paragraph about the inspiration for the story, I realized that this desk was in some ways a burden to which I felt somehow responsible. And the story was about a writer who inherited a desk from a poet, who later was kidnapped by Pinochet's secret police. All of this somehow had to do with the idea of the burden of inheritance. Of course, it's not about the inheritance of physical objects but emotional inheritance—things that are passed on through our parents and that we then pass down to our children.

BOLLEN: Why did you decide to include Chile and a poet who is among the missing of Pinochet's dictatorship?

KRAUSS: At the time I was reading a lot about that period in Chilean history. I can't say exactly what led me there. In History of Love, Chile was an imaginary place—this long, narrow, fantastic place at the end of the earth. And I'd never been there, so it was a place to imagine a story into. After that, I was invited to Chile to be a judge on a competition and I took the invitation. That's when I began to read a lot about the real Chile, especially its very dark history in the '70s following Pinochet's coup. I became obsessed with these people who were kidnapped, often tortured, and killed—or just simply disappeared.

BOLLEN: You said you began writing not knowing how the structure would come together. Were there other stories or characters who eventually got stripped out?

KRAUSS: There were others but they kind of failed to come alive and real, so they were thrown out. It's a Pinocchio element, the chance of becoming fully alive and real. And some characters reached a dead end, where they weren't compelling enough to me.

BOLLEN: You write about parents and kids quite often. When you wrote History of Love, you hadn't had children yet. Now you have two. Do you see that experience as having an appreciable effect on your writing—say, in comparison to when you wrote your first book, Man Walks into a Room, in your early twenties?

KRAUSS: The hope is that one is always changing. I don't want to write the same book and I couldn't, because I'm a different person. Having children is one of the most radical experiences you can have. Obviously that flooded into this novel. This book explores parenthood from really dark angles. For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, in the voice of Aaron, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.

BOLLEN: Before you have kids, you can only really play off of how you remember your own childhood.

KRAUSS: But life in general in my experience gets deeper and deeper, more and more profound, more and more complex, the older one gets. Don't you find?

BOLLEN: Sometimes I'm impressed by how much more I felt when I was younger.

KRAUSS: In one's youth, one has tremendous access to one's feelings. And as one gets older, some of those feelings kind of drift away. But so much more happens to you. There's more at stake in life. When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity—some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.

BOLLEN: I know you don't like to be referred to as a "Jewish writer," or to grouped that way in order to explain the work you make. But of course Judaism plays a big part in your novels. There is a point where one character talks about how Jews have figured everything out in this life but they've never created an afterlife. They stop thinking as soon as it comes to what happens at death. That got me thinking about the value placed on the desk—the object of this world, and I couldn't help but wonder if maybe that need to hold on to what is here is a symptom of not knowing by faith what is there after death.

KRAUSS: It interests me insofar as you don't have truth at our disposal as an easy consolation. In other religions there is a clear understanding of an eternal hereafter or an everlasting heaven. The sense I was describing in the part of the book you are referring to is a sense of not being able to be consoled or never knowing for sure what is to follow. That uncertainty or doubt is so critical—an intellectual inheritance of arguments, questions, and dissatisfactions. That feeling is everywhere in the book, and it's not only a Jewish thing, although perhaps it comes to me through that channel. The story that the title is partially taken from in Great House is the story that is a Jewish story but ultimately to me a quite human, universal one. Here is this Jewish sage faced with the question after this loss of Jerusalem, on which this entire history of people has depended [Ed.: Krauss refers here to first-century Jewish sage Yochanan ben Zakaai who, after Jerusalem falls to the Romans and the Temple is burned, proposes a moveable faith that doesn't rely on a place or loacation but teaching and oral law]. Judaism until then was this very political and national idea. The basic system just ceases to exist. The sage's answer was a radical reinvention of the people. We'll replace sacrifice in the temple with prayer. We'll make this portable. We'll take what's external and make it internal. All these things that we now think of as Judaism largely have to do with that shift that happened under him. That's one of many sort of examples, but this idea of how we willfully re-imagine ourselves—the active role of the imagination in the creation of self.

BOLLEN: And it's a beautiful idea—growing around something that isn't there.

KRAUSS: In one way you are shaped by that loss, but there's also this willful shaping of self.

Congratulations on Great House being named a Finalist for the National Book Award in fiction.  This is your third book.  How did the writing of this novel compare to the work you’d done previously?

It’s important to me feel I’m always changing as a writer, for each book to move beyond the last, take different risks, be propelled by a different set of ambitions. And Great House does feel, on every level, like a departure from everything I’ve written before. But at the same time, of course one has certain preoccupations that accompany one, evolving from book to book, and I’m aware of having carried some of these with me from The History of Love, and Man Walks Into a Room before that. There are threads that stitch all three novels together: the question of how we respond to great loss, an interest in the re-imagining or recreation of self in the wake of it; the struggle to be known, to transcend solitude. I’m also often told that my novels are about memory—though I do I find myself wondering what novel isn’t, in some vague way, about memory? Memory, which is a creative and on some level willful act, is our primary means of creating a coherent self, and any exploration of the inner life, of what makes a character who he or she is, will have to confront the complexity of what James Wood once called “the remembering mind.” It’s certainly of great interest to me, and probably always will be.

A similarity among the fiction finalists this year is the use of an alternating narrative point-of-view. You grant readers access to different characters’ consciousnesses throughout the novel. While this isn’t a necessarily new narrative technique, I wonder if its current prevalence isn’t indicative of something in our culture.  What led to your decision to employ different points-of-view?

When I think about structure, which to me depends so much on rhythm, I always imagine it in either architectural or musical terms. Baroque music—I’m thinking especially of Bach—often combined three or even four distinct voices into a whole without dissolving each. I like to disorient myself in my work, to become lost, in order to arrive at the unexpected or unknown. I find that it’s harder to do this in a more individualist form—a single story line based on progression, climax, and reconciliation. In general I find that sort of structure more restrictive, less flexible and open.

The narration of Great House develops in four voices, each a kind of confession, and there are further voices and stories pocketed in those main voices. But the voices reflect, echo, dovetail, refract, and form symmetries with each other, creating a large interlocking structure with, I hope, many dimensions. I was interested in sustaining the separation between the voices, but at the same time my sense of the wholeness of the novel, its coherence as a unified story, however complex, was always the overwhelming force in writing it. Perhaps a way to think of it is as a large house where one dwells in many rooms, enters through many doors, follows voices down corridors, looks out through windows, before one is allowed, in the end, to see the house from the outside. That, anyway, was my experience in writing it.

 
How much of the story do you know before you start?  Is your imagination liberated by parameters—such as writing toward a specific ending or knowing you’re exploring a particular theme—or is it fueled by a lack of structure and the act of discovery?  These aren’t mutually exclusive positions, but I wonder if you find yourself on one side more often than the other.
 
I’ve never written my books with any sort of plan or blueprint in mind, preferring to pursue accidents and intuitions. The eventual structure always rises out of the words and narratives as they unfold, and for much of the writing I am lost and uncertain, with only a mood and enduring preoccupations to guide me. The more experienced a writer I become, the more I’ve come to depend on this uncertainty, the deeper I’ve dropped myself in the woods each time, the farther apart I’ve plotted the starting points of paths that will eventually have to converge, or at the very least sum to something.

In Great House my uncertainty was more acute than ever. The starting points I chose were almost impossibly remote from one another. From out of all the early writing, four voices emerged, each with its own story. I had four different paths, and all I knew was that 1) I wanted to understand who these people were and what had made them that way, and 2) woven together, their stories could make a solid and intricate whole, that their juxtaposition would reveal patterns, and form a complete architectureﾑeven, or especially, if I couldnﾕt anticipate that architecture. Working this way, sooner or later I find myself thrown off balance, trying to find my way in unfamiliar territory; only then do I feel that the real work has begun.

In the fiction category this year, each of the novels seems heavily researched.  What role does research play in your writing process?

Almost none. The main places where I set Great House are cities I’ve lived in and known all my life, and my memories of these places are more or less precise. After I finished the novel, I wrote to various friends to ask if you do indeed, pass the trenches Ypres on the way to Brussels if you’re coming from Calais (yes), or whether there were commercials for whores on German television in the Seventies (no), or whether the ticket hall at the West Finchley Tube station was above ground, as I remembered, or below, and so on— but these questions mostly involved details that had no real bearing on the stories themselves.

There was historical information that mattered to me as I wrote. For example, the fate of those kidnapped and disappeared under Pinochet’s regime in Chile, or the fact that that Pinochet’s coup in 1973 and Israel’s Yom Kippur War took place three weeks apart, or that Freud fled Vienna in 1938 and his wife and daughter reassembled his study almost exactly, down to the last detail, in the house he moved into in North London, etc. But I was very familiar with these histories before I began writing. Somehow they found their way into the novel, but in most cases they eventually sunk to the bottom of the stories, became submerged, and appear on the surface only fleetingly.
Almost the whole novel is completely invented, imagined through and through. I can’t stress enough the importance to me of not being bound to reality, of feeling that I am completely free artistically. As for the true stories and historical facts that occasionally guided me, the question, for me, was why I was drawn to these particular things. Why had they gotten under my skin? Writing novels has always been a way for me to shine a light on, and give form to, certain enduring preoccupations, often ones that have been with me for many years.

 
The novel is set in America, London, and Jerusalem.  What role does setting play in your writing?

Yes, parts of Great House are set in New York, others in London, Jerusalem, Budapest, the countryside outside Brussels, Frankfurt; the shadow of Chile falls over the book as well. Much of this geography is very personal to me, critical to the story of my own life. On some level, writing for me is an effort to create a home, something that, for various reasons, has been an elusive idea in my life, and stitching together the many places my family comes from is part of that effort. My mother is from London, as a child I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ house there, and then later I myself lived between London and Oxford for some years. My father grew up in Israel, my parents met and married there, as did one set of grandparents; the other lived there for a quarter of a century and died there. England and Israel are among the places of my life, and as such I imagine I will always return to them in my work.

 
 
In some ways, one of the most significant characters in Great House is the Chilean poet’s desk.  In The History of Love, one could argue the book was something of a main character.  The artifacts cycle through the novels, accruing a deep and complex emotional resonance.  Was such evolution your intention or were you surprised when the desk became such an active part of the novel?

It was just an instinct to begin to pass the desk from one character to another. I still don’t think of the desk as central to the novel―in fact, as I wrote it, I thought of it as a book without a center, made instead of many moving parts held together by shared emotional and intellectual forces. The desk is a vessel for some of those forces.

I was, however, aware of trying to write frankly about what is means to be a writer, the difficulties involved, and also the enormous potential. Almost all of my characters are engaged with the struggle to overcome their isolation, to be seen and known in the fullest possible sense. It’s no accident that writing is the means many of them turn to, and that a book first, and now a desk, should have taken on critical roles in my novels. I’ve staked my life, as both a reader and a writer, on the belief that literature offers a unique chance―unparalleled―really, to step directly and vividly, without any mediation, into another’s life, to feel what it is to occupy the conditions of another’s existence.