Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities

A Review of

Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Winter 2021

Antiquities
Cynthia Ozick
Knopf ($21)

 

Literary wizard Cynthia Ozick has long been fascinated by idolatry, imposture, and imitation, perhaps in art even more than in life, and at age ninety-three she’s conjured up yet another magic ventriloquism act to impersonate and mock and outdo her greatest literary idols. Studying Henry James in graduate school in the 1950s, she cherished her master’s Jane-Austenian chess games, but she was also under the spell of William Gaddis, whose techniques and themes exploded James’s two-dimensional playing board. Emerging in the postmodern 1960s alongside a tiny palmful of peers such as Thomas Pynchon and Angela Carter, Ozick created an aesthetic and moral order for her fiction that was all its own—especially in its subversion of Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hellenism and Hebraism—and her new novel, Antiquities, takes her already warped chess game into a whole new dimension.

Set in midcentury-modern New York (an aesthetic that the narrator decries and the author almost certainly holds dear), Antiquities begins as an octogenarian character’s attempt at writing a brief memoir that’s to be included in an anthology commemorating the tony boys’ school he’d attended in the 1880s, and where he’s again become lodged with the few remaining trustees, who are dying fast. The narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a wealthy former lawyer and casual anti-Semite, had been a distant relative of the renowned Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, and among his most cherished possessions is a cache of supposed antiquities that his father had brought back from his attempt to join Petrie’s excavations. The memoir strives to unearth the mysteries of the narrator’s relationship with the novel’s curiously named deuteragonist, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who’d briefly been his friend at the even curiouserly Hebraic-sounding Temple Academy for Boys, and to reconcile these mysteries with the relics his father had brought back from Egypt’s Elephantine island. As his memoir and Ozick move both backward and forward, the modern world continuously interrupts Lloyd’s haphazard composition process, with his fellow trustees literally attacking his typewriter, which is his most tangible link to his beloved former secretary, who also becomes part of the memoir, which increasingly spirals out of control and into the most deliriously twisted digressions.

 

Cynthia Ozick

The wizardry of Ozick here is in her absolute control of these seemingly random digressions, which she wields as precisely as a conductor’s baton, and in her loving yet damning impersonation of her befuddled narrator. Ozick undoubtedly adores much of the world he inhabits—the midcentury of her own youth, the gilded age of her early reading, and the Jamesian links of memory threading between the two—but she also keeps a clear, masterful head for the moral and spiritual valences that organize and direct her narrative, despite her narrator’s loopy ineptitude. Lloyd’s voice and mind and memory are so strikingly particular, and his preoccupations and habits so deeply embedded in how he attempts to conduct his narrative, that Ozick’s impersonation of him is clearly the result of the most profound exploration and revision. His longueurs are comically out of touch, but Ozick’s prose—which is precisely conterminous with her narrator’s—is brilliantly sharp and relevant and knowing, recalling the Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in how the exact same words can have radically divergent meanings and power when composed by different people in different times.

Ozick’s attentiveness to all the other characters, no matter how seemingly minor, also reveals the depth of her care and patience and empathy in crafting each of their unique haecceities. Every character in this tiny novel has a backstory, and living emotions and motivations and complexities, and Ozick never forgets a single one of them, displaying a sense of canny organization and heartfelt commitment that directly belies her narrator’s confused lucubrations, which, again, inhabit Ozick’s exact same words in the exact same order. It’s truly remarkable how fully realized this novel and its denizens are, and how many varied windows Ozick has created for us to see and hear them through.

 

My ancient copy of Levitation

In her 1997 masterwork The Puttermesser Papers, a five-chapter novel that Ozick composed at the pace of a chapter a decade, the protagonist creates a golem that grows completely out of control and proportion, so that its appetites devour virtually everything. Always conscious of the creator/creation aspect of literature, Ozick tempers her narrative homunculus in Antiquities so that his clueless divagations remain in perfect counterpoint to his long-absent chess opponent, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who may not actually exist—or whose proboscidian stature may in fact exist on a level that relegates the elite Lloyd to irrelevant heathenry. Is Petrie the rock that this novel is founded upon, or is he and his kind merely foundering in Egyptian sand? In her brilliant 1979 short story “Levitation” Ozick describes a party in which all the Jewish guests float up into the air, and perhaps Antiquities plays with this chosen-people leavening too. Is Lloyd an abomination, or is he the custodian of the true relics of a true history? And do we need to choose which? Culminating the novel (and perhaps her career) with an enigmatically open end that can be interpreted differently by different mindsets, Ozick confronts the reader with the mystery of life in a way that recalls the most inscrutable of Kafka’s parables. Making everything in her literary universe a metaphor for writing, Ozick’s last line calls attention to the gamey play of her novel’s chess pieces, and not in a Jamesian way, but rather in a Lewis-Carrollingian way. Or, ultimately, in an Ozickian way. Levitating into the ether as she nears the end of her life, Ozick’s apotheosis elevates her among the very greatest of literary luminaries.

—David Wiley

Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground

A Review of Richard Wright’s

The Man Who Lived Underground 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2021

The Man Who Lived Underground
Richard Wright
Library of America (22.95)

After publishing his 1940 novel Native Son, Richard Wright became a literary superstar who had the freedom to pursue any inspiration he chose. Those disparate inspirations included a photo-documentary, an uncompleted novel about black domestic workers, and a surreal experimental novel called The Man Who Lived Underground, which was rejected by his publishers and which has only now appeared in its complete form.

Exploring the bizarre adventures of a black man who descends into the sewers to escape the police after he’s wrongly accused of murder, The Man Who Lived Underground is like nothing else Wright had written by then, following a dreamlike logic that reads far more like German Expressionism than like the Urban Realism of Native Son. Short excerpts of the novel appeared in 1942, and among its fans was Ralph Ellison, who ran with many of its concepts and approaches in his 1952 masterpiece Invisible Man. Disappointed by the novel’s rejection, Wright honed it into a much more effective short story that appeared in a journal in 1944, and then much later in his posthumous story collection Eight Men.

In addition to the full novel, the present volume contains the remarkable essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” in which Wright explicates what he was trying to do in The Man Who Lived Underground, while also pointing forward to his genre-defining memoir, Black Boy, which clearly grew out of this underground seam of exploration. Wright’s essay opens with this astonishing claim:

 

I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground.

  

This statement seems undeniably true, but that doesn’t mean that the novel works as an organic whole or that it accomplishes what Wright intended.

Richard Wright

The first section of The Man Who Lived Underground reads like hard-boiled detective pulp, appearing to the reader to be mostly realistic and believable, with a brutal focus on the protagonist Fred Daniels’s shocking mistreatment by the police, who extract a false confession from him. After a weirdly unconvincing series of events, Fred escapes into the sewers, where he almost immediately attains a detached, transcendent viewpoint on the world and its woes. Fans of Native Son’s crystalline naturalism would have been terribly put off to see Wright’s progressions not making seamless sense—and not because of Fred’s trippy mental evolutions, which are quite intriguing, but because the novel’s wild arcs don’t encompass a foundation to support themselves.

Tunnelling through the sewers, Fred somehow scrapes his way into basement after basement, observing and judging the world’s unfortunate souls while somehow never being heard or seen. He witnesses a church choir and pities their obsequious self-denigrations; he shakes his head at a theater full of moviegoers, who he feels are just living a ghost-life and laughing at themselves; he easily finds all the tools and sustenance he needs to survive underground; and he cracks safes and breaks into jewelry shops to liberate untold riches, which in his newly alienated state he sees as entirely without intrinsic meaning or value. He plasters his cave with hundred-dollar bills, and he mashes the jewels into the ground to look like stars in the firmament, and eventually he begins to feel that he must reemerge into the world with a message for humanity—and to assume the mantle of guilt.

A drawing by Franz Kafka

Wright’s grandson Malcolm Wright contributes an afterword to this volume, making a convincing argument that the novel is an inverse take on Plato’s cave allegory, but the most immediate and obvious literary influences at play here are certainly Kafka and Dostoyevsky. The unjustly accused man (The Trial) digs into the earth to escape his persecutors (“The Burrow”) and then goes through a series of inner transformations that work in counterpoint to his physical degeneration and lead to a bizarrely Christ-like apotheosis (“The Metamorphosis”). In the later short-story version Wright goes so far as to have Fred navigate his way with fingers that “toyed in space, like the antennae of an insect.” Likewise, the hated man who lives beneath the world (Notes from Underground) grows to accept and cherish his guilt and yearns to pay the consequences (Crime and Punishment). It’s a startling literary landscape for the author of Native Son to explore, and it would have drastically altered his own landscape—and that of his contemporaries—had he been able to make it work on the scale he envisioned.

From the Invisible Man films

Without Wright’s accompanying essay, many of the novel’s aims fail to land, in part because the writing is neither realistic enough nor daringly magical enough to hold it all together. This is terrain that requires an Ellison, who somehow divined the Invisible Man theme from it and took it to another literary universe. In the essay Wright discusses the Invisible Man films as a key influence on creating a character who exists completely apart from humanity and who observes and judges it in secret. But the word “invisible” appears nowhere in the novel itself. Perhaps Wright let Ellison read the essay, which has only become publicly available in this volume, or perhaps Ellison was just a magician. Either way, The Man Who Lived Underground serves as a fascinating bridge between drastically different literary sensibilities and has now revised the trajectory of American Modernism.

 

—David Wiley

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

 

A Review of

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral

Originally Published on the Online Version of the

Rain Taxi Review of Literature, Summer 2021

 

Cathedral
Ben Hopkins
Europa Editions, $26

 

In F for Fake, his fraudulent documentary about fraudulence in the art world, Orson Welles pauses in his descent into imposture to hold aloft Chartres Cathedral as perhaps the one true thing that our culture has created. It will be our legacy, he posits, and it will “testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.” Cannily, Welles fails to mention that the Gothic grandeur of Chartres was also founded upon an epic fraud, its majestic marshalling of spiritual and artistic and economic and political forces predicated on the absurd pretense that the pilgrimage site housed the tunic that Mary wore while birthing Jesus. Encompassing a labyrinth of these kinds of interconnected dreams and deceptions, screenwriter and filmmaker Ben Hopkins’s monumental debut novel, Cathedral, constructs an edifice whose design ranges from the most sublime heights of inspiration to the most degenerate political depths, with all of them counterbalancing each other and maintaining each other’s intricate facades.

Hopkins begins the novel with a bit of Wellesian legerdemain, enticing the reader into believing that this will be a kind of pilgrimage into artistic and spiritual fulfillment, with stock characters to root for and expect to develop, and the great trick is that these initial cliches are as enjoyable as they are blatantly dubious. There’s the visionary master-builder who’s visited the newly constructed Gothic cathedrals of medieval France and who’s been given charge of redesigning the cathedral of Hagenberg, a burgeoning city on the Rhine, in this soaring new style. Then there’s his callow disciple, who we expect to grow to self-realization and mastery of his own over the long course of the building’s bildung. Then there’s the master-builder’s outrageously idealized muse, an ethereal magician’s daughter whose beauty and purity stretch the reader’s credulity and patience. Countering these three, there’s the Bishop’s treasurer, a brilliantly Machiavellian schemer who holds the purse strings for the cathedral’s construction and who has no problem manufacturing heretics to squash in order to plunder their loot. In a traditional novel of this sort, he would be the dark underside of the matter that the author portrays as important and true, but in Hopkins’s medieval world of realpolitik, he and his kind are this novel’s true matter.

The nave of Chartres Cathedral

Rapidly subverting the agony-and-ecstasy cliches of the artistic Bildungsroman, Hopkins largely discards the idealistic cathedral theme and plunges the reader into the most brutally pragmatic political machinations, taking as much time and interest in teasing out the intricacies of the local clergy, nobles, merchants, and bureaucrats as he does in explicating the vast Papal and Imperial intrigues that keep the locals in constant adaptation and evolution. A truly Darwinian novel, Cathedral never remains static as its denizens build and rebuild the structures of their lives, both in competition and in symbiosis with each other. Alliances and friendships arise and fall and rise again in new forms as they balance and rebalance against all the other forces around them, the characters’ anthill associations scattering and regathering like a sped-up version of the incessantly redrawn and renegotiated plans for the cathedral, which despite everything continues its ascent.

Readers looking for medieval literature’s cathedral-like summa aesthetics—and ever-ascending spiritual edge-play—may be disappointed by this novel’s ultimately ghostless machine. A great Gothic cathedral is like the cosmos, with its every section and subsection forming itself into an ever-fractaling and ever-ornate atomic density. Visiting the lacy whorls of Strasbourg cathedral is like walking up to an enormous thumbprint that becomes more astoundingly elaborate with each step forward, as if you were gradually descending into an electron microscope. Hopkins’s novel is nothing like this. His prose isn’t at all lapidary, but instead rapid and vigorous, and you don’t pause on it in rapt wonder, but rather get swept along by its force. He has a powerful vocabulary, but his readers won’t get the easter-egg-hunt joy of searching the dictionary or internet five times a page to discover the names of clothes and carriage parts and architectural details that they’ll recognize from medieval paintings, as they do when reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris. They also won’t find themselves immersed in a heady web of Scholastic theology, as in Henry Adams or Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco. Nor will they encounter a penetrating exploration of the math that consumes some of the book’s characters, with the “sacred geometry” that undergirds the great Gothic cathedrals going completely unmentioned. Hopkins’s master is history, not aesthetics or metaphysics.

Ben Hopkins

As a screenwriter and filmmaker, Hopkins also employs far more filmic allusions than he does literary ones. He stonefacedly references Monty Python at two very unfunny moments, and he also makes a few glancing nods toward The Princess Bride, which was written by another great screenwriter/novelist, without ever alluding to that novel/film’s origins in Greek prose literature, particularly Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. He does seem to echo some of Hugo’s celebrated “Feast of Fools” scene, but only in subject matter, not in language or method or aesthetic. Nicknaming his jejune stonecutter “Rettich” and placing great stress on the association with the word radish, Hopkins almost certainly invokes the celebrated Chartres scene in F for Fake, during which Welles mistily refers to the contemporary human as a “poor forked radish,” an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s riff on Falstaff’s description of Robert Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2. It’s quite a thread of association from film to architecture to literature, and Hopkins dispenses with that thread on the novel’s first page. Otherwise largely literature free in its associative language and aesthetic order, this brilliantly imagined, gorgeously designed, and deeply profound novel is nonetheless a magnificent work of literature itself. It took Hopkins eight years to construct this extraordinary novel, and it will likely stand as his lasting legacy.

 

—David Wiley