Nicole Krauss

While Jonathan Safran Foer just made New York Press’s “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” list, Ms. Krauss would likely beg to differ; she married him. What does this have to do with Krauss’s The History of Love, published just a month after Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Quite a bit, it turns out, when you look between the covers. The following aptly describes both books: A very old Holocaust survivor who has spent his postwar life in tortured isolation trades chapters with a very clever young person who is on a journey across New York City to uncover a mystery. In both books, the journeyer’s mythically wonderful father has died young. Both books indulge in Internet-age visual play, with graphics and page layout trickery to enhance the story. Both have a distant and mournful mother whose children wander recklessly in a world proven unpredictable and cruel, as well as a man who, grief-stricken into silence, is reduced to yes-and-no gestures to communicate with a child. The similarities continue — Call it the single-mindedness of marriage, or something else, but Krauss is darn lucky she writes as well as her husband. Her book is completely engrossing, beautifully told, and, despite the above (not to mention its generic snooze of a title), quite original.