Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss    {Reviewed by THOMAS} Does anything that happens extinguish by the fact of happening all the things that could have happened in its place (extinguishing thereby also all the things that could have been going to happen as a result of any of those things)? Whether everything that can happen does happen (each possibility in its own universe) may be a matter of serious discussion among quantum physicists and multiversalists but it is self-evident to writers and readers of fiction and forms the basis of their shared practice. In Forest Dark, a novelist named Nicole, who evidently shares the memories, circumstances and history of the author (at least up until the moment the book is written), despairs both about her relationship with the father of her children and about her seeming inability to write another novel. “I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and in my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give things shape at all.” She despairs of the novelistic conventions that bind both writer and reader, obscuring greater with lesser truths. “Chaos is the truth the narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its deliberate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.” One day Nicole has the sensation that she is already in her house, that she is a double of herself, and leaves New York to stay in the brutalist Hilton hotel in Tel Aviv, a place she had stayed many times in her childhood, ostensibly to start writing her novel. She meets an enigmatic retired academic (or Mossad agent), who convinces her of the possibility that Franz Kafka did not die in Austria in 1924 but emigrated to Palestine and lived out his life quietly and pseudonymously as a gardener. Nicole recognises that this alternative history is fraught with implausibilities, but “between the two stories of Kafka’s life and death, the one Friedman had drawn struck me as having the most beautiful shape — more complex but also more subtle, and so closer to the truth. In the light of it, the familiar story now seemed clumsy, overblown, and steeped in cliché.” Soon she resigns herself to being driven by Friedman into the desert, with a suitcase seemingly containing the unpublished Kafka papers (that at the time of the novel were in the possession of Kafka’s friend and de facto literary executor Max Brod’s secretary’s daughters and the subject of a complex court case concerning ownership (of Kafka as much as of the papers)). The chapters of Nicole’s first person account are alternated with those concerning Jules Epstein, a prominent and wealthy New York lawyer, who, following the deaths of his parents, leaves his wife and his practice, sells off his art collection and travels to the Tel Aviv Hilton, ostensibly to fund a fitting memorial to his parents if he can find something worth funding (trying to overcompensate, perhaps, for the hatred he feels for his parents but cannot admit even to himself). Like Nicole, he has been accustomed to living in an active mode: “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.” And, also like Nicole, his progress through the novel is characterised and enabled by his relinquishment of this active mode, relinquishment leading to the desert and dissolution. There are many resonances between the two strands of the novel, and the reader wonders whether perhaps the characters might meet (though it is likely that they inhabit parallel universes rather than a shared universe), or whether the third-person Epstein thread has been written by the Nicole character in the other thread (though it is likely that both the Nicole thread and the Epstein thread were written by the Nicole from whom the Nicole of the Nicole thread split at the time the novel was begun (well, obviously, we know this to be the case)). All this makes for a wonderfully supple and inventive (and often funny) exploration of the possibilities of fiction. Krauss is ambivalent about fiction in the same way that she feels the ambivalences of her Jewishness: tradition, expectation and understanding are forms of binding, losses of freedom, traps, but the struggle to be free of tradition, of expectation, of understanding, to break the binding, to invert the trap, to unmake and remake, are also inherent in being a writer and a Jew.