Overview
Forest Dark has two narrative threads, occupying alternate chapters, both concerning characters who have found themselves adrift. One centers on a New York philanthropist named Jules Epstein, who has recently disappeared in Israel. The other is narrated by an American novelist named Nicole. On returning home one afternoon, Nicole steps into the house and realizes that she’s already there: “Simply that: already there. Moving through the rooms upstairs, or asleep in the bed; it hardly mattered what I was doing, what mattered was the certainty with which I knew that I was in the house already.” A ringing telephone breaks the spell, and the sense of doubleness passes.
The novelist in Forest Dark has been successful, but she’s struggling to find her way into her next novel and her marriage is failing. She doesn’t regret her choices, exactly–she loves her tow young sons–but she’s aware that in choosing domesticity, another life was lost: “When I was young I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn’t brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention…While the other unformed and nameless life grew dimmer and dimmer, less and less accessible, until I succeeded in closing the door on it completely.”
It would be naïve to imagine that the writer in the novel is the writer who wrote it, but there are certain unavoidable parallels. Forest Dark is Krauss’s first novel in seven years, which suggests that it took some time to find the thread of the new book, and she separated a couple of years ago from her husband, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, with whom she has two sons.
The writer in Forest Dark has developed an interest in the multiverse, which is the kind of ideas that can turn into something of a rabbit hole: “What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone in a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world? In other words, what if it’s human perception and creativity that are responsible for creating the multiverse?”
Which is to say, what if we construct our individual realities in the same way writers write novels, assembling the details of the world out of thin air? As she wrestles with her book, she’s increasingly drawn to a hotel she’s been visiting since childhood, the Hilton in Tel Aviv. Perhaps if she goes there, she finds herself thinking, she’ll be able to figure out how to proceed. She sets off on an impromptu trip with no definite return date.
The other narrative thread involves Epstein, who vanishes in the first chapter. His chapters initially read as a solidly fictional echo of the possibly-somewhat non-fictional Nicole chapters. Epstein was always a vibrant man, the kind of quintessentially combative New Yorker whose day hasn’t properly started until he’s gotten into an argument with someone. But in the months leading up to his disappearance, he hasn’t felt like himself. He’s been giving away possessions and enormous sums of money, long past the point at which his accountant begged him to stop. When he’s jettisoned nearly everything that seems extraneous, he finds himself drawn to his birthplace, and leaves New York for Tel Aviv. He stays for a while at the Hilton before drifting down the beach to Jaffa. When he disappears sometime later, a concentrated search turns up only a monogrammed briefcase in the desert.
While the Nicole chapters are written in a somewhat confessional style, and in the first person, the Epstein chapters are in the third person and have a certain shine about them, a polished sense of remove. All of Krauss’s favorite themes and preoccupations are here: memory, solitude, the inner life of an elderly Jewish man, the meditations on Israel and on what it means to be Jewish in the homeland and in the diaspora.
All of Krauss’s favorite themes are here: memory, solitude, meditations on what it means to be Jewish
As such, it’s easy at first to imagine that this is one of those postmodern constructions wherein a writer alternates chapters with her fictional character. In a less ambitious version, our narrator would go to the Tel Aviv Hilton and find the thread of her elusive next novel, which is to say that Nicole would find Epstein. But Krauss has opted for something much more interesting, and the novel that emerges is a book of mirrors, a dazzling and fascinating meditation of fiction itself, and on doubleness and echoes. “The idea of being in two places at once,” the writer in Forest Dark tells us, “goes back a long way with me.” It explores the quasi-literary way we build up our understanding of the world, paying attention to some details and not others. It examines the way the founding of a city might resemble the writing of a novel. It’s not accident that both Epstein and Nicole are bound for Tel Aviv.
At the outset, Nicole finds that she’s lost faith in the entire enterprise of novels, in the artifice of the form: “Why had I really come to Tel Aviv? In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does. Even where there appears to be no motivation, later on it is always revealed by the subtle architecture of plot and resonance that there was one.” But if the whole business of writing novels–of creating something that wasn’t there before–is an exercise in artifice, Krauss seems to suggest, so is everything else. Here is Epstein, contemplating his life and his accomplishments in the weeks leading up to his disappearance: “All his life he had turned what wasn’t into what was, hadn’t he? He had pressed what did not and could not exist into bright existence.”
Plot & Analysis
Early in Forest Dark, one of its narrators–a successful Brooklyn novelist named Nicole–meditates on the limits of fiction. Though she has long practiced its art, she finds herself frustrated by its inability to capture what she terms “formlessness.” In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray.
This contradictory desire–to use form to consider formlessness–is Forest Dark‘s animating impulse. 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. 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. Yet, all these signs of plot flame up only to sputter out. Novels have trained us to imbue coincidences with significance, but Forest Dark creates them only to insist on randomness.
Much of Nicole’s narration describes dissatisfaction with her own reality. Both her family life and her writing are dissolving under the pressures of success. Fiction, once liberating, has become “another form of binding,” while marriage and motherhood insist on a version of happiness that atrophies other kinds of emotional experience. Though Nicole’s portion of Forest Dark is insistently personal, both a story of divorce and an unsettling quest narrative, it also hints that the only way out of such trouble is to get as far outside oneself as possible.
These concerns are shared by Forest Dark’s other half. Newly retired and divorced, possessed of a flush lifetime’s worth of beautiful things, Epstein grapples with the question of what, if anything, he wants to keep. As he gives away Patek Philippe watches and old masters paintings–the kind of objects equal to a massive estate–he becomes consumed by the desire to create an adequate memorial to his deceased parents, chronically fractious Holocaust survivors for whom argument and life were synonymous. At the same time, the most intimate of things of Epstein’s existence–his phone, his desires, the literal coat off his back–are taken from him in ways over which he has no control. His portion of the novel is bookended by his physical disappearance, anticipated by his own sense that the boundaries between himself and the world are dissolving: “He watched the waves, and felt himself to be also endless, repeating, filled with unseen life…At dusk, he would go out and walk, agitated, waiting, lost among the narrow streets, until, turning a corner and coming upon the sea all over again, he was unskinned.”
Set largely in Israel, where existential questions merge in especially thorny ways with issues of physical boundaries, Forest Dark often depicts states of being and knowing that are dependent upon opposition. Nicole and Epstein each consider love’s relationship to forms of violence, physical and emotional. Both experiences demand an other, both (at least here) bring the self into better view by placing it in context with that of another. Epstein’s fade to black beings the moment he stops orienting himself in relation to those closest to him. It’s not that he stops caring. It’s that, as when he finds himself “unskinned,” the divide between Epstein and everything else becomes indeterminate.
The novel is self-consciously indebted to Kafka, whose biographical details are woven into Nicole’s story. Nicole, an ardent admirer of Kafka’s work, finds herself drawn into a mystery surrounding Kafka’s estate, one so alluring that it would seem implausible were it not based on the truth-is-strange-than-fiction history of an elderly cat hoarder, Eva Hoffe, who claimed legal rights to Kafka’s unpublished papers. In appropriately Kafkaesque fashion, unseen forces coerce Nicole into participation in this mystery without ever allowing her to understand what it’s all about, leaving her in a condition of disorienting uncertainty.
Kafka’s legacy is apparent, too, in Forest Dark‘s fascination with opposites, complements, and contradictions, even when, as is the case with the Nicole and Epstein sections, it’s hard to tell which of these relationships is at play. At one point, a rabbi lectures Epstein and a crowd of diplomatic luminaries about the difference between opposites and absences. Such lessons, scattered throughout Forest Dark, suggest that if there is anything that might be called knowledge, it inheres in the slippage between seemingly irreconcilable things. When Nicole speaks of her desire to find a narrative form that can hold formlessness, it is this interpretation-defying version of writing she seems to imagine, where internal contradiction and endless uncertainty are the best way to get at the bedlam of lived experience.
In its many metanarrative features, Forest Dark can feel like the novelist equivalent of Rene Magritte’s pipe painting. Photographs of key settings–actual, real-world places–are interspersed throughout Nicole’s narration, like Polaroids bookmarking the pages of a diary. Here and in passages in which Nicole chews over fiction’s limitations, what’s at issue isn’t so much accuracy or veracity as the strangeness of representational art’s relationship to small truths, to the fabric of the everyday and our perception of it. After all, the semi-fictional Nicole’s observations come to us from within a novel, a genre that is nothing so much as an unwieldy attempt to use language to tell a story whose point of origin or departure is the world we recognize as our own. If, as Nicole states, the kind of narrative she seeks is the one that would successfully capture the fundamentally non-narrative qualities of what we tend to call “real life,” why hold on to fiction, with all its attendant formal artifices, at all?
Forest Dark can be read, in part, as Krauss’s contribution to this collection of new, urgently self-questioning autofiction. When Krauss talks of frustration with fiction from within her own novel, it often seems to be a frustration with the way fiction can make not only the self but also the world in general seem more stable and organized than it actually is. From this perspective, mimicking realistic human experience with purely fictional characters and invented plots seems not merely presumptuous but impossible.
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