Word: ozick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LEVITATION: FIVE FICTIONS by Cynthia Ozick Knopf; 158 pages...
...Cynthia Ozick's career went public in 1966 with Trust, an intellectually ambitious, technically challenging first novel about personal and political betrayal. If the clang of metaphorical boiler plate rang in the reader's ear, so did the voice of new talent. Trust remains Ozick's only published novel. Her reputation rests mainly on collections of short fiction: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories and Bloodshed and Three Novellas. In these works, the author's philosophical and social overview narrowed and intensified. She could be outrageously satirical about current styles of New York life...
Much of Levitation presents Ozick in the role of a woman wonder-rabbi spreading paradox and fantasy. She tries too hard. Fantasy requires a softer touch and more control than are found in these stories. Some of Ozick's figurative language is spell-breaking. The phrase "suckled the Nazi boot" seems to have dropped from a punk rock lyric. A "transient mirage" that teases the "medulla oblongata" is not only overwrought but inappropriate for this part of the brain...
...Ozick is more successful when she builds on realism. Lucy of the title story is a convert to Judaism who marries Feingold, a Manhattan editor obsessed with the persecution of medieval Jews. Both Feingolds have published novels, spend their evenings toiling over new books, and joke that they are "secondary-level people." Only it is not a joke. "Jews and women!" thinks Lucy. "They were both beside the point. It was necessary to put aside pity; to look to the center; to abandon selflessness; to study power...
...Ozick does not exercise her talents casually. An essay on aesthetics and the psychology of ghostly doubles tugs beneath the surface of Shots. From a Refugee's Notebook focuses on a Sigmund Freud who dreams of becoming a god, and then shifts to a science-fiction planet where a community of female dialecticians known as the Sewing Harem is the source of a society's rise and fall...