This new collection of essays by novelist Ozick offers a staggering array of fierce attractions: a style that combines light grace, virility, and profundity; literary analysis of measured brilliance; a lack of all timidity in asserting difficult beliefs; and—most specifically—her stiff-necked, powerful notion of Jewish covenantal "ardor." Ozick begins, however, with Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Truman Capote—coming away from each one with something hard-won and unexpected: Woolf's madness is seen as an opportunity to provide moment for the Jewish seriousness of husband (and assumed saint) Leonard; Forster's homosexual shame, not pride, is revealed in Maurice; Capote's work becomes the foremost example of the novel "that is fragrant with narcissism, that claims essence sans existence, that either will not get its shoes drekky or else elevates drek to cultishness—the novel, in short, of the esthetic will—[which] cannot survive its cult." And though each of these essays illuminates a very complex flaw or failure, how they fit in with Ozick's unique view of Art only becomes clear when she moves on to more particularly Jewish subjects: Harold Bloom, Harris' The Goy, Up-dike's Bech, and the oddly Christian formulations of Allen Ginsberg. As a Jew, it soon emerges, Ozick is concerned with the "sacral," the novel of Deed instead of sensibility, the non-transcandent. Thus, in her vision, Jewish artists and thinkers who deny—or fudge with—the Second Commandment against idol-worship ("Art," for Ozick, is the equivalent of idol-making) only commit a multiplied and vitiating illusion: "The problem of Diaspora in its most crucial essence is the problem of esthetics. . . . The religion of Art isolates the Jew—only the Jew is indifferent to esthetics, only the Jew wants to 'passionately wallow in the human reality'. . . The Jewish writer, if he intends himself really to be a Jewish writer, is all alone, judging culture like mad, while the rest of culture just goes on being culture." And this provocative mixture of approaches—the covenantal, the critical, the anti-idolatrous—is then given its most vigorous stir in "Towards a New Yiddish," a controversial essay which rejects for Jewish writers an ecumenical, widened-out art, recommending in its place a "liturgical novel" that speaks directly only to other Jews. ("Not. . . didactic or prescriptive: on the contrary: Aggadic, utterly freed to invention, discourse, parable, experiment, enlightenment, profundity, humanity.") Hard to swallow? It is indeed. But Ozick knows how difficult her ideas are: a remarkable essay on "Literary Blacks and Jews" sings out with the tension of voluntary reghettoization; she realizes that to again shtetl-ize Jewish literary culture means giving up either enormous gains or enormous illusions. And the result is a book that recognizes opposing ideas without evasion or surrender—with an unashamed yet astonishingly sophisticated zealotry that seems to invite dissent on its own level (unlike the antipodal, curatorially expert views of Susan Sontag). In sum: a discomforting challenge—to Jews, to writers, to Jewish writers, to anyone concerned with "culture"—and a masterful, significant book.
Pub Date: May 17, 1983
ISBN: 0525481176
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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