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September 1, 2004
OGIC: Two or three serious ladies
It might be a bit of an understatement to say that Daniel Asa Rose admires Cynthia Ozick's new book, Heir to the Glimmering World. I don't know when I've seen such self-abasement in the service of such a good cause.Confession: It's not Virginia Woolf I'm afraid of--it's Cynthia Ozick.... She reminds me of Virginia Woolf, is why.
And a little of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And a lot of that odd-duck dyad, Charlotte Brontė/Jane Austen--waif-like women who pack a wallop, whose impeccably mouse-like demeanors belie their blazing insights. Just when you resign yourself to the fact that they're as meek and timorous as they seem, powch! comes the originality of their vision, the flammability of their passion, the cunning of their wisdom. (Others find them bold from the get-go, I realize; I'm only talking about how their aura reads to me.)
But mostly Ms. Ozick reminds me of Emily Dickinson. A Jewish Emily Dickinson, two dainty birdlike poets with great swoops of language, sharp claws of syntax. Small, gentle, delicate women who veil themselves with such fluttering modesty as to blindside you to the enormous stern force of their words.
I don't know or care whether they're "dainty," but on the evidence of their work alone I would throw Shirley Hazzard in with these ladies, and also Fernanda Eberstadt, about whom I'll have a lot more to say down the road. I read her 2003 novel The Furies early this summer and was knocked off my feet by it. Eberstadt's style is quite Ozickian, judging from what Rose quotes (liberally) in his review and from my own memory of The Puttermesser Papers, and she has the brainy artistry to more than pull it off. This is not a style for the weak of intention or intellect. It runs on high-grade insights--social, emotional, philosophical, what have you--and burns an astonishing quantity of the stuff per page.
Can anyone at Knopf write and tell me whether a paperback Furies is in the works? I was hoping to see it this fall, and wanted to use its publication as the occasion for a rave review. For now, that review joins the list of things I O U, along with the rest of my Allison Moorer swoon.
Posted September 1, 2004 3:41 AM
