Writers seldom try the 2nd-person narrator, and with good reason!

No doubt Nicole Krauss, in "Great House," owes a debt to the great A. B. Yehoshua, and it's not just the setting (of part of her novel) among the legal-community intelligentsia in contemporary Israel - it's also her penchant for experiment in narrative voice and plot structure. Yehoshua famously has written several novels that adhere to a weird narrative schema - for example, one that is entirely composed of one side of a dialog, the interlocuter's voice silent of understood - and Krauss tries some of the same: her novel composed in two parts, each with four sections with different places, characters, settings, the second part bringing, I hope, some closure and completion to the many unanswered questions of part 1. I'm enjoying reading Great House because, with some quibbles, each section is strong and credible and because Krauss opened the novel with a very provocative mystery - the tale of a writer's desk as it passes through the hands and lives of various owners - that I hope she will resolve. The first section in part II, picking up from one of the sections in part I, tells of a wayward son who returns to Israel for an awkward detente with his newly widowed father; Krauss has the father narrate this section in 2nd person, as some kind of letter or statement to the difficult son - and there's a reason few writers attempt the 2nd person, because it can feel very strained and phony: the voice is more Krauss's than an elderly Israeli attorney and, more important, about 95 percent of the narrative is stuff the supposed recipient would already know. I continue to feel that Krauss is a really strong writer but that she is not as well suited to the narrative experiments that so appeal to her - if she could just settle down and tell her story, her novel would be stronger - but I'm still holding out hope for a solid conclusion.