TO BE A MAN

The latest collection of stories from Krauss is a wonder, with the author’s signature straddling of the tragic and the absurd, her particularly Jewish frame of reference, and the extraordinary range of her narrative voice. One story traces the erotic awakenings of three young women; the next follows an older man named Brodman as he emerges from surgery to find his brand-new grandson about to undergo his bris. These stories are remarkable enough, but deep in the book, Krauss departs, ever so subtly, from a strict allegiance to realism. In the unsettlingly prescient “Future Emergencies,” New York City residents are urged to wear the gas masks being distributed at designated centers. Nobody knows why, but the evening news is also providing instructions on how to safely seal windows and doors. “Amour” is set in a near future where whatever has happened to the world—war? devastating climate change?—goes unstated, but the main characters find themselves, as a result, in a refugee camp. And yet in both stories, the futuristic or, as it is sometimes called, “speculative” aspects are quietly located in the background. At the forefront of each is the relationship between a couple. In the end, perhaps that’s what makes these tales so moving and so disconcerting. Brodman, out of surgery, realizes that “his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he’d had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years.”

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