Mysticism and metamorphosis

‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following a straight line out of the forest, the more appealing it sounds to me to get lost in that forest …’ Like the author, this character is called Nicole, lives in Brooklyn, and is a writer and mother. Struggling with her work and her marriage, life is indeed a ‘forest dark’, and we follow her through the tangle of it. Interleaved with Nicole’s half of the novel, is Jules Epstein’s — a bombastic, wealthy, older New York Jew, who we meet when the ‘strong weather of being Epstein no longer gusted outward’ but has turned inward as, Lear-like, he sheds himself of worldly possessions in an effort to gain spiritual understanding.

The novel’s two strands don’t overlap, but they do have a great deal in common. Both Epstein and Nicole are New York Jews, who cut loose from family and go to Israel (where ‘jaws, postures, building, trees’ all share ‘the hard, determined form of that which lives and grows in opposition’).