Perhaps the fullest fictional treatment yet of the European intellectual’s flight from Hitler’s Germany—to safety, and,...
A family of German Jewish refugees, the orphaned girl who becomes their servant, and the troubled son of a children’s author coexist uneasily in Ozick’s fifth novel (The Puttermesser Papers, 1997, etc.).
In one of its matching narratives, young Rose Meadows, alone after the death of her vain, underachieving father, is hired by Professor Rudolf Mitwisser as nanny and housemaid to his listless wife Elsa and their five children. But the Mitwissers are as impecunious as they are imperious and dictatorial. No salary is forthcoming, and Rose soon learns that Mitwisser’s arcane researches into the history of an obscure “heretical” Jewish sect (the Karaites), opposed to rabbinical interpretation of scripture, have earned him only a materially unrewarding academic sinecure. Rose also discovers the connection between the Mitwissers and chronic itinerant James A’bair, whose own narrative discloses the commercial success of his father’s beloved creation the “Bear Boy,” his lifelong attempts to escape the prisons of family fame and wealth, and his serendipitous acquaintance with the Mitwissers—resulting both in his generosity to them and his “theft” of their teenaged daughter Anneliese. Ozick delineates with passion and precision Rose’s immersion in the “glimmering world” of intellectual preoccupation that her employers do and do not incarnate, resisting the pull of the prewar outside world—deftly represented by Rose’s importunate “cousin” Bertram and his beloved, a fiery radical self-named “Ninel (“Lenin” spelled backwards). The thematic and narrative content here are almost forbiddingly rich and do slow the action. But the characterizations are acute—notably that of matriarch Elsa, once a distinguished scientist and a former colleague and intimate of Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger (who may be her eldest child’s father), sunk in a slough of disorientation and depression.
Perhaps the fullest fictional treatment yet of the European intellectual’s flight from Hitler’s Germany—to safety, and, ironically, to inconsequence—in America. One of Ozick’s most interesting and challenging books.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-47049-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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