Over years, four narratives knit together

Almost anything this review says will erode the puzzle-solving, be-your-own-architect pleasure of reading “Great House.’’ Nevertheless, the four narrators are Nadia, an American writer on a trip to Jerusalem; an unnamed Israeli widower; Arthur, a retired Oxford don; and Isabel, an American woman of unknown occupation living in New York. All four are middle-aged or older, telling their stories — making their confessions, really. A situation in the present, not to be revealed here, links them dramatically. But their accounts concern the past.

Rilke advised us to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and . . . try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms.” Because each of the four narrators focuses on someone else — a loved one dead or missing — their accounts are based upon questions. Nadia is haunted by Daniel Varsky, a young Chilean poet whom she met only once; the Israeli narrator, by his long-estranged son, Dov; Arthur, by his deceased wife, Lotte, a writer with a lifelong secret who barely escaped the Nazis; Isabel, by the family of her former lover Yoav. For these four, the passionate quest to understand — or simply to find out the facts about — another person hides or buries a longing to find themselves.