In her debut Man Walks into a Room, Krauss's writing has, at its best, a kind of limpid quality which befits the subject of this rather cool, thoughtful, elliptically precise novel - the tale of a man who loses all of his memories from after the age of 12 and then begins to reconstruct his life (a wife, an apartment, friends, belongings, losses, none of which he can recall). It's quite episodic, which I admire when done well (as it largely is here), and again this structural/stylistic gambit is apt to the subject matter, creating a sense of a series of meditative, carefully impressionistic vignettes rather than a more conventional narrative - which, to me, invokes the perceptual and experiential streams constituting consciousness (also, the image of the mind as an undisturbed glassy lake).
And the ending. Ah, the ending. The History of Love had one of the most purely affecting endings I've ever read, and while the closing pages of Man Walks into a Room don't quite knit in the same way (at least for me), the brief epilogue has an elegiac poignancy which left me with a twist in my stomach and a slight catch in my throat.
I think that one of the reasons why I like Krauss's novels is that she writes a lot of sentences which are like the kinds of sentences that I try to write, and she puts them together in ways that I try to put them together. While I liked Man Walks into a Room, though, I found it perhaps too cool, too distant - it's not a cold book, but nor does it have the same warmth and generosity as The History of Love, and in the end it's not quite emotionally satisfying...it's very much a first novel, albeit in some ways quite a brilliant one. I find it much easier to admire than to love.
