LEVITATION

Of the five fictions here, only one commands, by breadth and pacing, great attention; yet all must be said to fairly drum with Ozick's insistent and constant theme: tradition. In "Levitation," a married couple—he Jew, she Gentile, both second-rate novelists—give a second-rate party which culminates in an inability to square the two's separate inherited visions. "Shots" concerns a woman photographer commissioned to follow around an historian with a too-good-to-be-true wife; it's an awkward story that loses itself in its own flailing ironies. "From a Refugee's Notebook" offers two quick allegories (one on spoiled American women) that are as subtle as air-horns. And in "Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife," a 34-year-old, single woman (a lawyer working for the city) dreams of Eden and her forebears—a need for the past that's keyed to the lack of significant reality she finds around her; like the description of Puttermesser's hair ("layered waves from scalp to tip, like imbricated roofing tile"), the story is wiry and stubborn. Moreover, all four of these fictions are, ultimately, sticks—thorny, sharply thin sticks that Ozick uses to beat the reader: for the crimes of being too forgetful, too trendy, too ecumenical, or too homogenized, we receive one lash after another of her bitten-off, terse, nervously intelligent style. By way of contrast, however, there is the concluding and longest story, "The Laughter of Akiva"—about an English-born bachelor headmaster of a Long Island Jewish-day school who falls prey to the sin of pride-in-blood, yet totally misunderstands the deeper knowledge contained in mother-love. Here the curled scorn rolls out and fascinates us above and beyond its sting; beautifully (if attenuatedly) written, with perfect atmosphere, the story has an unscrolled irony to it, a straining toward real knowledge characteristic of Ozick at her best (as in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories). . . but missing, unfortunately, from the rest of this new collection.