A life of missed connections

If a novel were a still-life portrait, “The History of Love” would be a triumph. It would be enough that the octogenarian Leo Gursky, a brilliant writer cheated of recognition and living bereft in New York, has been wrenched into lilting, painful life by his creator, Nicole Krauss.

Fiction wants movement, though. There is no lack of movement in “History”; on the contrary, it resembles a spring tightly wound and released to zip erratically every which way. Moreover, it zips through such webs of mystification that reading it alternates between astonished pleasure and a decoding so laborious as to make you suspect that the message, plain, is less remarkable than the devices used to obscure it.

To sum up the plot is to grasp a centipede by a half-dozen of its wriggling legs. Gursky, a young Polish Jew, was in love with Alma, who emigrated to New York before the outbreak of World War II. Inspired, he wrote “The History of Love.” Fearing capture by the Germans, he turned the manuscript over to Litvinoff, a rivalrous writer friend (for literary success as well as for Alma) who was on his way to South America.

Litvinoff proceeded to copy it under his own name; his wife, Rosa, translated it into Spanish and it was published in Chile, winning him local literary renown. Having arrived in New York some years later, Gursky wrote asking for his manuscript. The take-charge Rosa wrote back that it had been destroyed in a basement flood (which she quickly arranged).

Gursky had sought out Alma but, learning she was married, gallantly stayed away even though she’d born his son, Isaac. Gursky lives penuriously as a locksmith until, old and ill, he writes a second novel, which he sends anonymously to Isaac, now an honored novelist. (Pushing all the buttons on the literary elevator, Krauss gives him admiring quotes from Edmund Wilson, Philip Roth and Leon Wieseltier.) By the end, Gursky learns that credit has once again been abducted, this time by his son.

Along with all this febrile, curiously clouded activity, which I’ve simplified drastically, a second story is developed. Alma Singer mourns her father, David, who died when she was 14, leaving her responsible for the whole universe: She labors to remedy the depression of her mother, Charlotte, and the mystical wackiness of her little brother, Bird. (He believes himself to be a “lamed vovnik,” one of 36 holy Jews alone entitled to speak with God.)

Traveling in Argentina, David picked up a remaindered copy of “The History of Love,” admired it fervently and gave it to his wife. Alma’s name is taken from the book, one of the cobweb connections that will link her story to Gursky’s. By coincidence (not really, of course), a letter arrives commissioning the widowed Charlotte to translate “History” into English. The signature turns out to belong to a character in one of Isaac’s novels.

Which is more than enough of the plot, though only a fraction of what Krauss presents. Mystery (the goad that aims at invigorating a novel’s pace) manages to be no more than a puzzle (a drag that slows it down). The writer’s connections are closer to tangles. Only disconnect, readers may wish to tell her. When not frustrated, they may find themselves close to cheering. Not over young Alma’s questing and questions nor over the precocious cabalism of Bird, who breaks a wrist in the belief that he can fly from a second-story window.

These half-orphans can be touching but rather insistently so. They bear a faint resemblance, though they are less self-consciously hyped up, to Oskar, the father-mourning hero of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” (Krauss is the wife of that novel’s author, Jonathan Safran Foer.)

It is Gursky who shines. He refuses to gloss over his disappointments, his bitterness, his heartbreak, his physical decrepitude. He names each of these, insistently, not with self-pity but with the glee of battle.

To make his precarious way around his tiny, crowded apartment, he plots a baseball diamond using his bed (home plate), toilet (first base), the table (second) and the front door (third). If it’s Bruno knocking (an aged, cantankerously interfering friend or perhaps a figment of the old writer’s devising -- we won’t know until the end), “I let him in without a word and then jog back to bed, the roar of the invisible crowd ringing in my ears.”

Death, looming, is perhaps Gursky’s only reliable companion, and he makes small preparations, for someone so bilked of recognition, to be seen and remembered. He drops his change at a store and takes extra time to pick it up. At the shoe store, he tries on a gaudy variety of samples and buys none. “All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen,” he protests. Presenting himself in answer to an ad for a nude model, he marvels: “To have so much looked at.”

Gursky’s fogged consciousness certainly contributes to the novel’s erratic movement. On the other hand, it draws a wonderfully stirring portrait of one particular battle of old age: that of an artist no longer able to distinguish between what he tremulously invents and unreliably perceives. *