TRUST

The protagonist of this astounding first novel— the "I" unnamed, the "observer from the ledge of the world," is a girl who finds out one summer who she is and from what past experiences she came. Weaving from past to present and burrowing into the action and the meaning of the immediate moment, Cynthia Ozick creates from her keen intelligence a strong story, a plethora of ideas, and a realistic confrontation of people's motives and a love that touches the "observer." In an often "Latinate" torrent of prose, the mystery unwinds. The girl is not the child of Enoch, man of history, whom she sees in the Europe of late 1945 poring over endless lists of dead names, and whom she observes arguing about a trust, money and threats, with a strange man and her mother, Allegra. Nor is she the child of William, her mother's previous husband, the broken "trust holder," who will later reveal "what" she is and why the trust disintegrated. Finally, on the ruined island estate near New York she meets her father. In the gathering storm of the book's movement toward this meeting and its fatal side-resolutions, one objects only to the length and depth of description concerning the more fantastic figures, Allegra and the Purse family, incessant punsters on their name... But all the density of the author's hard, heady style should be absorbed, for from it come particular images and a total impression that simply do not let go.