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