Great House - National Book Award Finalist

A day after its release, Nicole Krauss's novel Great House was named a National Book Award finalist, which is either a great bit of luck or a great bit of marketing.

It's not surprising, though. The novel -- which tells the story of a massive desk (yes, a desk) that trades owners from a middle-aged writer in the USA to a vindictive Israeli Holocaust survivor to a South American radical -- is sprawling, confusing, and beautiful. It's a book that makes you kick yourself and bite your tongue because it's so full-on and self-centered (you'll see what I mean in a second). But, at the same time, it really is great.

The book opens with a middle-aged writer, spilling over with despair, as she tells the story of a Chilean poet she loved. He left her to go back to his native country, where he was captured by the government -- he was a protestor in a country where that sort of thing was usually fatal -- and the poet was subsequently tortured and killed. Years later, a young woman shows up pretending to be his daughter, and summarily removes the desk, leaving the writer both deskless and with an incredible writer's block.

And that's the first chapter. I didn't spoil it, I promise -- you know every detail of the story from the start, except where the plot is headed from there. Where it's headed is in a number of different directions, with several disconnected stories that intersect at times but never entirely unite. It's quite beautiful, but it's like watching a movie you know is supposed to be great. You're never sure whether it's actually going to entertain you, in the end.

Whatever Great House does, it does to 100%. The book is made of two parts and eight chapters, each told by one of four narrators. This sounds confusing, but it's actually not at all -- the stories are so distinctive and remarkable, and each cuts off at just the right point, that you thirst for resolution until the latter half of the book. All four narrators basically share the same voice -- you know this voice; it's a thoughtful, carefully meandering New Yorker-style of monologue. There aren't even quotes around dialogue. Also, nothing happens. There's no character progression, not for the main characters, anyway. Each is narrating the story in one place, unmoving, with full awareness of his or her audience and position as a storyteller.

Not that I'm complaining. Even if the characters all talk the same, the voice is so compelling that it's hard to nitpick. Metaphorically or literally, she's caught all of these characters in a moment between drunkenness (painful, honest drunkenness) and standing on death's door -- those times where people are most candid, blunt, and where they can see the sum of their lives.


GH takes its name from a story at the book's very end -- a story snatched from Rich Cohen's book Israel Is Real, who snatched it in turn from the Talmud. In the end, you'll realize, Great House was in fact entertaining -- each moment of it, you're in the moment, even if it's only a single moment that lasts through each of its 30-page chapters. I still can't tell you exactly what happened in the book, but I can tell you I'm already feeling nostalgic to go back and revisit it.

but the voice is so compelling that it's hard to nitpickN

Banksy's Simpsons Intro

If you don't know about Banksy, go here, or read the brilliant book The Calder Game, which is the only children's book I know of about graffiti and art terrorism.
Anyway, Banksy just posted this intro to the Simpsons, featuring an Asian sweat shop and a unicorn. It's sad and brilliant.

Kids' Night Out

By 11:30 P.M., I was almost wiped. Two hours of carrying a kid on your shoulders, and she starts to feel a lot heavier than that six-pack-sized newborn that your wife delivered only two years ago.

You’re tired. You want to go to sleep. You remember fishing her out of her cot at 7 a.m. that morning, she couldn’t possibly have weighed as heavy as she does now, and how does she manage to go this long with only having one nap? You would kill for a nap.

An hour later, she is still going strong. It’s nearly one in the morning, we’re just sitting down to dinner at the house of people we just met, I’m trying to remember their names at the same time as I’m trying not to fall asleep in the far-too-comfortable chairs in their dining room…and my daughter is having an all-out Lego war in the living room with the family’s son.

I swear: This isn’t like us. Our kids are usually in bed by 7:oo. On most nights, we are responsible people.

But then Simchat Torah hit.

Simchat Torah — literally, “Rejoicing of the Torah” — is basically created to be a kids’ holiday. Sukkot, where you construct an eight-foot-tall booth in the backyard? Not so much. On Rosh Hashanah you blow into a ram’s horn called a shofar, which my daughter hasn’t mastered — no matter how much she practices, it still sounds like a poor imitation of a fart (which, under other circumstances, would be pretty awesome). But the main part of Simchat Torah is dancing around with a Torah and eating cookies in the shape of Hebrew letters. Kids can get with that. If I wasn’t still semi-embarrassed about what our new neighbors thought of us, I’d be all over it, slam-dancing with my own plush Torah and noshing down on gimels and ayins until morning came.

When we got to synagogue, forget about joyfulness, my kids pretty much went bananas. The baby is pretty happy no matter what — give her a brightly-colored fuzzy anything and she’ll gleefully drool all over it. But our older daughter usually sits in a corner, watching everyone else. Not tonight. After getting buzzed on a piece of cake (we don’t usually let her eat cake or candy, except for one piece, on holidays, and then only at synagogue) she proceeded to hug her miniature Torah while jumping all over the place, in unison — or in lack of it — with the other kids. The festivities started at 7:30, half an hour after her usual bedtime (have I mentioned?), but we gave her a late nap at 5:00 to prepare her.

And she was prepared.

And then she kept on being prepared.

This was our first Simchat Torah in the new community. We didn’t know how it would work, whether people would stay up late or bring their kids to synagogue or leave them home or put them to sleep in the synagogue’s basement and lock the doors. After much debate, we decided to play it by ear. We were still playing it by ear several hours later when, in between dances, a friendly stranger said, “What are you doing after this?”

“After this? Probably catching an hour of sleep and waking up when the baby cries and then sleepwalking through a feeding or two; why do you ask?”

He laughed like I was joking. “Come over for dinner,” he said.

I checked my watch. Dinner? But saying nothing was like saying yes — there we were, at his house, my daughter ripping apart his living room and extra place settings being arranged on the table. ”We have to get home,” I hissed in my wife’s ear for the eighteenth time that night, eyeing the daughter in her increasing rambunction.

“It’s okay,” my wife reassured me. “It’s just one night.”

I was skeptical. Men, I think, are accustomed to rigidity — to making up rules and sticking to them. Women have some sort of inner emergency break that lets them slow down, coast around, evaluate a situation and reconfigure their programming to accommodate it. I’m talking about my wife, of course, but I’m also talking about my daughter. Just as my eyes had started moving independently and I was sure I was already dreaming, the meal came to a close, hands were shaken and numbers exchanged — I told my daughter it was time to go home to bed and, for possibly the first time ever, she replied with a cheerful “yep!”

When she was an infant, she had the worst sleep problems. She’d cry herself off schedule and only get offer. The next day, we feared a regression. There was the damage — she woke up at 11:00 instead of her usual 7:30 — but then skipped her nap and went to bed exactly at 7. The night before might have been Simchat Torah, but that night, when her head hit the pillow and she closed her eyes for 12 and a half hours exactly, was my rejoicing.

Jonathan Ames Doesn't Look Jewish

OK, first up -- HBO's series Bored to Death just premiered. Here's the whole first episode of the new season:



Jonathan Ames, the creator of the series, is a hilarious writer, and the author of a dozen or so books. (One of my favorite things about him: he recently told Stephen Elliott that the turning point in his career came when he stopped wanting to be a great writer and started wanting to tell great stories.) He's Jewish, and doesn't look it. This conversation comes from a recent interview with Powell's:

Georgie: In your novels, and sometimes in your columns, you have mentioned being Jewish but looking fair and somewhat "Aryan." Did you ever witness anti-Semitism by people who presumed you weren't Jewish?

Ames: [I]n my youth, for a brief period, probably between nineteen to twenty-one, I probably didn't look Jewish, my hair was very blonde from being at the beach a lot, from the ocean, so I think I made mention of not looking Jewish during that period. And I think it was during this period that people would make anti-Semitic remarks, assuming I wasn't Jewish, and it had the effect on me that I wouldn't say I was Jewish, because I think that I was embarrassed embarrassed for them, embarrassed for me, and wanting them to like me. But I was also hurt, and a little bit disgusted, and that, I think, has to do with the thing of the Aryan appearance.

It's an interesting phenomenon of the Jew, who is a minority, and yet can sort of assimilate into the culture. Someone I was talking to, during an interview, was talking about the unusual place of the Jew, in the way of being this minority that isn't necessarily visibly marked as a minority. Of course, if one is wearing the yarmulke or is Hassidic, then you know. But sometimes we can walk amongst you!

And then you watch the show and realize that Ames is being portrayed by Jason Schwartzman, who might be the most stereotypical-looking Jew west of the Mississippi. Which is kind of an awesome uber-commentary, and a kind of touching hat-tip to the idea that Jews own Hollywood.

A Sukkah of One's Own

Jeremy looked out the window to the office and announced it wasn't raining. "There are a few people with umbrellas," he said. "But, just, the wimpy ones -- you know?"

It was 1:15, a little more than halfway through the day. I decided it was time to make my move. So I jumped out to the street and headed for the Bryant Park Sukkah.



Technically, even during this week when we try to eat every meal inside a sukkah, you don't have to duck into one of those fanciful little bamboo huts if it's raining. And I'm at work today in Midtown, not in my awesome neck of Brooklyn with a tabernacle waiting right outside my kitchen.

So you can imagine my surprise when the sukkah -- which is made to house several hundred people at a go -- was dead empty, except for me and the dude who was minding it, the sukkah gatekeeper. Sort of like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, but, well, less Jewish-looking.

Color me disappointed. I remember last year, I had to fight to get through the doors. And today, after a little rain -- warm rain, at that -- the place is as deserted as a synagogue ten minutes after the end of a fast!? Please, people. This is NEW YORK. You are NEW YORKERS. You aren't supposed to be afraid of rain. Especially when it isn't really even raining.

But I ate. It was actually a really incredible experience -- just me, this huge space, watching people hustle back and forth outside the tiny wooden door. I've said the blessing for eating in a sukkah at least fifty times over this holiday (yes, I snack a lot) but this was the first time I said it with real feeling. Like I'd walked ten blocks and hunted down this sukkah to say it. Like I'd said hi to Rick Moranis and struck up 2 minutes of small-talk with him just so I could say this blessing. So the drops that fell on my head, falling from a decoration posed awry, had purpose. Like I'd earned this blessing to say.

Outside, the sky was gray. Inside, there were weird shopping-mall-like autumnal flourishes of plastic leaves. The zygote-rain gave the inside of the sukkah a fine mist, like the spritz of a squirt-bottle at a barbershop. But do I look wet to you? My hair isn't even frizzing.

OK, well -- maybe it's frizzing a little.

But you can handle it. You are, after all, New York.

1/20: The Punky Trailer

If you're looking at this on Facebook or something and can't see the embedded film, click here right now, because your life is about to change in the best way possible.

Yep -- it's the trailer to the movie I wrote, directed by Gerardo del Castillo.

(Second trailer to come. Or it's not that hard to find. I like this one better, although the other one features the amazing band Against Me, who helped with the movie.)