Closure is hard to come by for the predominantly Jewish characters in To Be a Man, the unsparing, wistful and finespun first collection of short fiction by the novelist Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark, among others). As one character puts it, "History was what happened to other people while the Jews were waiting for the Messiah to come."
Even divorce and death are unfinished business for Krauss's cast. In "End Days," a teenager who must deliver her parents' judgment of divorce to a rabbi finds the cause of their split frustratingly elusive and her parents' lack of rancor perplexing: "No one was hurt; each had gotten what they wanted. They were in agreement about no longer needing to agree on how to live the rest of their lives." In "The Husband," a social services agent shows up at the Tel Aviv apartment of a 73-year-old widow and presents an old man to her as her husband.
Catastrophes of varying orders of magnitude undergird most of To Be a Man's 10 stories. In "Future Emergencies," a New Yorker living in the post-9/11 city mulls over her new government-issue gas mask, as well as her relationship with her longtime live-in boyfriend. Krauss's stories can read like character studies, proceeding at a deliberate pace that reflects her protagonists' preoccupation with examining one facet of their lives, or maybe someone else's. Characters are both hamstrung and buoyed by what one calls "the absurdity, and also the truth, of the dramas we need to feel fully alive." To Be a Man is a sure-handed collection about, and well suited to, unsure times. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer