Small Spiral Notebook: You’ve written two novels, and are in the midst of a third. These are still early days, but have any enduring concerns emerged—problems, ideas, arguments, or frames of mind you see yourself continually returning to in your fiction?

Nicole Krauss: Yes, though I’m wary of trying to articulate these things. A certain nebulousness about why one has chosen one's peculiar subjects seems like a helpful thing. Analyzing such decisions opens the door to a species of self-consciousness that I am always trying to shut out. But, without stopping for too long to wonder why, I can say that everything I’ve written so far seems to have found much of its energy in exploring the chasm between the self and others. My characters all seem to be somehow isolated. In the beginning it was because of something obvious such as the loss of their memory, or grief, but as time has passed I’ve had less use for these outward explanations, needing only the normal conditions of life in which to conduct further explorations into the negotiations of the self—the expansion or contraction of its freedom when it comes up against others, the use of the imagination as solace or for self-invention, the contortions it performs in the hope of being understood. It is one of the many lessons I’ve learned as a writer these past few years: that I can smuggle my pathos and trouble into almost anything, and once within, expand, investigate, test, and illuminate it there, in a side of beef as easily as a train to Poland, East 52nd Street as easily as my grandfather’s grave. So there’s alienation, but it doesn’t end there; the isolated characters I’m drawn to aren’t ones who are content with the conditions as they are. Who would be, one wonders? But of course there are those. Beckett—a writer to whom I always return—certainly mined the rich vein of alienation, but in all of his brilliant articulation of it there is little suggestion that things could ever be any different. And it seems to me that for some people things are different, and of course other writers have staked their tents in the rich messiness of human entanglement.That’s not my subject now, and it might not ever be. But, however removed, I work in view of it.

SSN: In the last seven years, the years since you began to write novels, have you noticed any changes in your reading life? Are you still the same reader you were before, or do you come to books differently now that you’re engaged in trying to write them?

NK: There’s no question that I’ve changed as a reader. I suppose when one turns any passion into a profession something of the simplicity and unselfconsciousness of the original pleasure is lost. Not all of it, of course, and there is the gain of other, newer sorts of pleasures that have to do with noticing and appreciating a writer’s decisions. I can still lose myself in a book, but it happens more rarely. It isn’t just the development of a critical sense that I’m talking about, and the detachment that comes along with that. When I was a student and writing papers every week about the books I was reading, I was still entirely open to persuasion, and, bursting with feeling, prepared to be moved at the drop of a hat. My reading really began to change when I started to write novels. I slowly started to acquire a sense of what it was I wanted to do myself. And that narrowed my patience with the sorts of books that didn’t speak to those aspirations. I began to write in the first place because it was a way to prolong the accompaniment and heightened sense that reading afforded me. And as I was getting older, and more experienced as a person, reader, and writer, I had a clearer sense of my peculiar tastes. I suppose you could say that my beginning to write novels coincided with the end of my student days and the beginning of my life as an adult, and no doubt that has something to do with these changes, too. I don’t think one becomes any less emotional as one get older, but the emotion is no longer spread evenly through everything one thinks and does: it hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. But as such, when one stumbles unknowingly into one of these abysses, the diameter and depth of a well, it’s very powerful.

SSN: Elsewhere, you’ve described the difficulties involved in writing—the psychological cost, one might say. Why do you continue to do it?

NK: For one thing, it has become a habit, a rather extensive one that is not only limited to a professional life but affects how I interact with the world in the most basic ways. I’ve been writing seriously for half of my life now, and because I began young, like so many, the process of writing became integral to how I order, calculate, and absorb my experiences. I don’t think I would function healthily without it—though as it turns out, it’s rather difficult to functional healthily with it. Difficult, but not impossible. And in certain ways I’ve grown attached to the difficulty. I don’t like it, and in fact often it is a nightmare. But the reward, once one is inside a book and steadily working, is enormous. I’ve never found anything else like it. Writing affords one tremendous freedom—to exercise the imagination, to alter and amend, to collapse and expand, to ascribe meaning, to design, to perform, to affect, to choose a life, to experiment, and on and on. It is work that demands one to be in constant contact with the most essential things. You can’t really skimp on your existential duties if you’re a writer—the work grinds your nose into it. But then, one day, the freedom and all of the emotional trawling amount to something, and suddenly you enter into a different plane of consciousness. It’s thrilling when it happens. The trouble begins when it doesn’t.

SSN: Writing necessarily demands that you return to your past, and the past in general, to mine it for material. Does this pervert your relationship to it at all?

NK: I’m sure that it does, to a degree. I rely on the past heavily. I’m in constant conversation with it, often without being aware of so being. Sometimes it is a vague conversation, and sometimes it is very pointed. But the real perversion, if there is one, has to do with my relationship to the present. I am naturally an observer, and as such I have the sense of always standing apart from things that are happening around me. I assume that I was like this to begin with, and that it’s part of what drew me toward writing, which with time enhanced or exaggerated the tendency. But it is a very strange way to live, and often it frustrates me. The only exception to it, or relief from it, that I’ve found is the time I spend with my son—he and I both would refuse to have it any other way, and in his presence I can abandon the otherwise perpetual narrative I am otherwise carrying on in my mind. But that is something relatively new in my life, and so far it is limited to being with him. I often imagine what it would be like to throw oneself into the fray, what it would be like to talk without thinking so much about talking, etc. But that doesn’t make it any easier to actually do it. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman attends his brother Henry’s funeral, already writing in his mind the novel about the lust that killed Henry, and Roth has him remark, “This profession even fucks up grief.” It’s not only that one cannibalizes life to feed the addiction of writing, but also that one’s real-time emotions are informed by the many hours and days one has already spent contemplating those emotions, their cause and effect, at a remove, as well as the knowledge that one will inevitably put this new crop through the mill at some point in the future.

SSN: Other writers must influence you. What about artists? Do you ever think of any painters when you work?

NK: Absolutely. When I started to write The History of Love I was thinking a lot about Philip Guston, and the work he did in the last ten years of his life, when he returned to figurative painting after a long mid-period of working in the abstract. He painted these crude, incredibly moving self-portraits, often depicting himself painting, smoking, eating, or sleeping, sometimes doing two or three of these at once. They’re very honest, naked expressions, intimate without being at all quiet, energetic while contemplating a life’s demise, bright and also dark. Inevitably, Guston informed my thoughts about Leo Gursky, the old man in my book. But he didn’t only affect the content, but also my approach. Guston worked by addition. He added paint on top of paint, building forms that seem almost to bulge forward into the viewer’s space. When he scraped paint away, it was only to add more. A history of gestures seems to buckle under the surface. This extroverted quality is at the heart of who Guston was as a painter. Above all, he wished to communicate. There is a wonderful painting he did in 1979, the year before he died, called Talking. It’s of a hand gesturing while holding two cigarettes, one that appears to have burned to the filter, the other giving off an outpouring of red smoke. What looks like a beaded chain hangs down, presumably attached to the bulb casting light on the talking hand, and though the wristwatch seems to read 3 o’clock, there is the feeling that the talking will go on indefinitely. And at the same time, his paintings of this time are very solitary. He was facing his own death. From him, I learned a certain attitude toward these things. Another painter I was thinking of quite a lot of at the time is RB Kitaj, who sadly died last week. Around the time that I began The History of Love, I was in a bookstore looking at a book of his paintings, and in it were these little stories he’d written in prose to accompany some of them. The sound of his voice got into my head, as did the look of his paintings, a certain strangeness he managed so well, strangeness and emotional acuity, and these things also influenced me.

SSN: It’s the end of 2007 now. How do you imagine the next twenty-five or thirty years of your life as a writer? Ideally, what would they bring?

NK: Ideally, they would bring year after year of satisfying work, and at the end a number of books that I am not too embarrassed by. Ideally, these books would be very different from one another, perhaps even radically so, and at the same time be held together by the development of certain enduring concerns, as you put it in your first question. As long as we’re speaking hopefully, I’d like to imagine that the difficult periods, particularly those I’ve experienced between books, will become less of a nightmare. Though recently I met an older writer that I deeply admire, a writer who has written more than twenty-five books, and he assured me that this was not going to be the case. He even wrote it for me on a piece of paper I now keep framed above my desk: It’s not going to get any better. Resign yourself to this. Strangely enough, it comforts me to look up at this little promise and imperative. It isn’t an easy life, but it’s a relief to know more or less what I’m in for.

Nicole Krauss is the author of the novels Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love, which won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and in 2007 she was selected as one of Granta’s Best Yong American Novelists. She was born in New York City in 1974, and now lives in Brooklyn. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.