You know what you need? More Cynthia Ozick
Greetings from my bed on a Sunday evening. I’ve been here all weekend, tucked in with a stack of books that I’ve been too tired to read. No, it isn’t Covid. It seems to just be a plain old cold. It feels almost nostalgic to just have a head cold, to be a little sick but not worried that the virus is playing Russian Roulette with my long-term health.
I’ve been lying here, thinking about how it’s getting to be that Best Of time of year, when I might reasonably share a list of my favorite books that I read in 2023. I considered it and... Man, I got tired just thinking about it. There’s no shortage of book lists out there. You don’t need mine. You know what I will share? A list of my favorite Cynthia Ozick books that I read this year.
I don’t know many things for sure, but I do know that you need more Ozick in your life. Yes, yes... You’ve heard her name for ages but you’ve never quite gotten around to reading her. (Unless you have, and then you know.) I bought her novel Heir to the Glimmering World when it came out in 2005 and stuck it on my shelf but didn’t read it. Then I moved it from Brooklyn to Portland in 2007 and stuck it on my shelf here but still didn’t read it. Then at some point I either sold it to Powell’s or gave it away because I’d had it for years and hadn’t read it. In 2021 I read a library copy of Antiquities and liked it very much, but it didn’t knock my socks off. That was the extent of my Ozick knowledge.
So this year, for reasons I can’t remember, I borrowed her 1997 novel, The Puttermesser Papers, from the library, not going in expecting all that much. Socks? Knocked off. Socks knocked all the fucking way off. It’s a masterpiece. (I then bought a copy, because that’s my rule with library books that I really love.) Seriously. One of the best novels I’ve ever read, and unlike any other novel I’ve ever read. It’s definitely influenced by Yiddish folktales, but still manages to be entirely Ozick’s own. (There’s a golem in it!) Fantastical and yet somehow deeply grounded in the world. I don’t know how she did it.
From there I moved on to The Messiah of Stockholm, which is about identity and trauma among Jewish refugees in post-war Europe. There is the potential here too for the fantastic, but it gets snuffed out by the end, though I don’t want to reveal too much because you should read it for yourself. Another swift, brilliant novel, wholly different from The Puttermesser Papers.
Next I read Heir to the Glimmering World (finally, after all these years!) and honestly was glad that I hadn’t read it before The Puttermesser Papers. Because...it was fine. It was well-written. But... Yeah. It didn’t do much for me. If I had read it back in 2005, that might have been it for me with Ozick, because there are so many books in the world and that one just didn’t grab me.
Onward. Next I read Foreign Bodies. In this one, set in the early fifties, a middle-aged New York school teacher, Bea Nightingale, allows her asshole brother to talk her into going to Paris to try to convince his son to return home to the States. Hijinks ensue. Okay, not actual hijinks. It’s grimmer than that. And you will likely want to grab the nephew by the scruff of the neck and shake him. But Bea is a fantastic character, and the web of relationships among the characters is beautifully wrought. I read after the fact that Ozick wrote this as a retelling of James’ The Ambassadors, a book I read in 1993 or so and recall absolutely nothing from, so I can’t speak to that. I loved the book entirely on its own merits.
I have several more of her books waiting for me in my to-be-read pile. Next up is The Cannibal Galaxy.
I may or may not post here again before the end of the year. If I’m not back here before January, I wish you all a happy new year, with the hope that next year will be a better, happier, kinder, safer, more peaceful one for all of us, with plenty of Cynthia Ozick novels in it.