Of the great Jewish-American novelists of the 20th century, who remains? Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are gone, as is the overlooked but equally brilliant Bernard Malamud. But we do have Cynthia Ozick, 97 this month and still going strong. Her writing has Roth’s discursive energy, Bellow’s chewy thinking and Malamud’s black ironies, but she has her own voice. Her masterpiece is The Shawl (1989), two linked stories — one short, one long — that prove that there are always new ways to write about the Holocaust.
So this new publication of a selection of Ozick’s stories and literary essays offers the perfect opportunity to get to know her — or get to know her better. What it immediately shows is that words are everything to Ozick. That might sound self-evident for a writer, but there aren’t many with Ozick’s appetite for juggling words, wrestling them down on the page, and making them work hard for the reader — which sometimes means making the reader work hard for them too. Written words, that is: she is less convinced by speech (“Conversation is air”) and once carried out an interview by being asked questions verbally, then typing out answers while the interviewer waited.
In one story here, Actors, Ozick writes about a playwright who hates “all these anaemic monosyllabic washed-out two-handers with their impotent little climaxes”, and wants a return to “theatrical noise”. She might have been writing about herself. Her stories are garrulous and meaty, where the plot is second to the swing of the dialogue and the reverberation of pounding syllables. In Actors, a theatre company thinks it can negotiate with an elderly man — “still alive at ninety-six, a living fossil, an actual breathing known-to-be-extinct duck-billed dodo” — only to find when they meet him that he “looked like a man who even now could take an axe to a bull”.
Characters in Ozick’s stories often have a scheme on the go. In What Happened to the Baby?, the narrator’s Uncle Simon wants to create a universal language (he considers Esperanto “insufficiently ambitious”) and “travelled all over the world” to work on this aim, “discarding the less common vowels”. But his family have concerns about “Simon and his diddlings”, not least his ex-wife (“that witch who had always kept him down”). The multi-stranded story resolves into a thing of simple, moving beauty, reflecting that the only language we all speak fluently is the language of deception.
Ozick’s hero is Henry James: the novella-like length of her stories and the density with which they’re constructed recall his own. James even features in one of the best stories here, Dictation. It’s another harebrained scheme: where the secretaries of James and his friend Joseph Conrad conspire to play a trick on their employers. It’s a story about taking back control and asserting yourself as the two women look up to these godlike writers (Conrad’s “lightning storms, his wild rushings and terrifying breathlessness”), but wonder whether their masters are, as one secretary’s mother puts it, “keeping you confined, using you up like that”.
Writers aren’t the only creative types who get a look-in. In Sin, it’s a portrait painter past his best, tottering and dozing and looking “like someone’s abandoned messiah”; in Virility, a terrible but indefatigable poet (“I suppose there was finally no editor alive who did not clutch his head at the sight of his name”), who suddenly, mysteriously, becomes good. In Levitation, a story about husband-and-wife novelists — “Anonymous mediocrities. They could not call themselves forgotten because they had never been noticed” — turns into something profound and strange about Jewishness (a regular current in Ozick’s fiction) and our desensitisation to horror by media saturation. “If there had been a camera at the Crucifixion Christianity would collapse, no one would ever feel anything about it.”
As with any selection of stories, there are quibbles. Ozick has made the selection and written the introduction, but a writer is not the best judge of their own work, and an outside view would have been better. She features some stories that are more a workout than a pleasure and, amazingly, doesn’t include The Shawl or any of her brilliant tales about Ruth Puttermesser, which were collected in The Puttermesser Papers (1997).
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But there are essays here too. These are as tight and rigorous as the fiction, and mostly about canonical literary figures. (Based on her essay on Malamud, she might object to my categorisation of her above as a Jewish writer, but I offer it anyway.) She is brilliant on Kafka, Isaac Babel and TS Eliot, a poet she loves despite the antisemitic “insults” in his work, describing him as a figure emblematic of how high culture once ruled the world; he was able to fill a football stadium, when 14,000 people came to Minneapolis in 1956 to hear him lecture on literary criticism.
Well, those days are gone. “Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognise,” Ozick once said in an interview. “It is, I admit, still my all, but it isn’t the all.” We should be glad she is still here, pursuing her obsession and keeping us right.
In a Yellow Wood: Selected Stories and Essays by Cynthia Ozick (Everyman’s Library £20 pp712). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
