THE SCRAPBOOK

A woman’s love affair is shadowed by the legacy of a tragedy a half-century earlier.

The first novel by literary critic and historian Clark—author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020)—is narrated by Anna, looking back at her relationship in the late 1990s with Christoph, a young German man. Anna is a budding English scholar graduating from Harvard, but Christoph, visiting a friend in Cambridge, waylays her broader ambitions with his charm and intellectual depth—much to the concern of her Jewish friends, who suspect he hasn’t shaken off his family's toxic Nazi history. Christoph’s grandfather served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht during World War II, while Anna’s grandfather was a U.S. soldier who helped liberate Dachau. (The scrapbook of the title refers to photographs of Holocaust victims he kept tucked away.) Does a family history of wealth that “came off the backs of murdered Jews” disqualify Christoph as a partner? How much does it cloud Anna’s affections for him? As they struggle through a long-distance relationship, the two are forthright about the challenges they face on that front—Clark is thoughtful on postwar Germany’s efforts to move beyond its Nazi past without ignoring it—but their relationship also faces some more conventional hassles in terms of betrayal and emotional distance. Clark writes about this milieu with grace and elegance, capturing Anna’s emotional frustration in acute detail. That largely rescues the novel from a plot that sometimes feels forced and potted; flashbacks featuring the pair’s grandfathers are rich in historic detail, but also feel pat. Still, Clark ultimately sells the idea that a present-day relationship can be shaped by forces that reside in a past we’d prefer to ignore.

An imperfect but ambitious take on the intellectual love story.