I go looking for a desk and find memories

Great House ****
by Nicole Krauss

After my grandmother died, I looked through her closet for an old wool field coat she used to wear (it looked sorta like the one at left), but it was nowhere among her possessions. What happened to that coat isn't really much of a mystery. It probably got moth-eaten and thrown out, or Gramma donated it to a sale. (Stick with me, here; I'm getting to the book eventually.)

But I got obsessed with finding that coat in the months after she died. I even had dreams about finding it, dreams I would wake from with a feeling of disappointment. 

It wasn't the coat I wanted, of course, so much as the memories it would trigger. I'd worn it many times on spring or autumn days when the weather seemed warm enough to start, but turned cold as it grew dark. Gramma would get out the coat, roll the sleeves way up to fit my scrawny frame and give me a flashlight to walk along the lake with. The coat was scratchy and heavy, the kind of warmth that meant business. The plaid was loud--greens and oranges--the kind of colors my grandmother gravitated to. The pockets always held ancient change, bobby pins, frowzed cotton balls, or old football ticket stubbs.

"Great House" is divided into two parts with four loosely connected narratives in each, and the narrative are connected by a search for an ancient and hulking desk that means different things to those who have owned it or are searching for it. The narratives were compelling enough to keep me up at night, and I made a lot of lists and charts while reading this book, thinking I would thereby be able to follow the mystery of the desk's ownership.

But I ended with a whole lot of question marks on my reading aids--and, in the end, the mystery of the desk's history isn't important any more than the mystery of what happened to Gramma's jacket all those decades ago. Rather, the novel is an exploration of nature of memory, individual and collective, that objects trigger, and how powerfully we believe that those triggers can tell us something. One character leaves New York for Jerusalem to find the desk. Another pays $1,000 just to sit at the desk for an hour. Only one character knows what is in the little locked desk drawer and jealously guards the key.

Krauss's novel is exhausting, purposely so, I think, as long-pursued memories often are. But, as anyone who has pursued a memory knows, time begins to fade and twist things, even as the pull of memory remains powerful. We may embellish memories to keep them real--Was Gramma's coat really orange and green, or do I remember it that way because those were her favorite colors?--or we may become distressed at how memory fades--What color were the buttons? Were the shoulders padded, or was that another coat I'm thinking of? "Great House" forces similar confusion with it's loose narrative style. Even with my lists and charts, there were times I lost the thread, had to erase or reconnect things--Which character had a piano? No, wait, didn't two characters have pianos? What was their connection? Were they related?

What "Great House" makes clear is that memory--how and why it works the way it does--is not a mystery to be solved in this lifetime. But the power of memory is not a mystery. In things remembered, like Gramma's coat, we are looking for essence and closure. If I could just put the jacket on one more time, I imagine, I would know something definitive about her. But I doubt I would know more than I know now, that she was a vinegary old lady with a yen for loud colors who knew how to keep children warm and safe in the cold, dark night.