Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

Her essays, along with Tom McCarthy’s, are full of literary insight. But both writers waste their energies on easy targets

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam.

But this is a quibble. This is Cynthia Ozick, for goodness sake. And, for goodness sake, if you haven’t read Cynthia Ozick — described by the late David Miller in his affectionate and indeed rather star-struck introduction to this volume as ‘the Athena of America’s literary pantheon, the Emily Dickinson of the Bronx, and one of the most accomplished and graceful literary stylists of her time’ — then really you should. Ozick occupies the fourth plinth among the other great statuesque figures of American Jewish writing — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud.

Wading through — luxuriating in, rather — this great omnium gatherum, Ozick’s unique strengths and weaknesses soon become apparent. There are at least half a dozen writers — Americans all — for whom she has the most profound and instinctive understanding and whose aims, intentions and failings she is often able to sum up in just a few words. Lionel Trilling: ‘Here was bitterness, here was regret.’ T.S. Eliot: ‘He had always been reticent; he had always hidden himself.’ And Saul Bellow: a ‘self-propelled’ thinker.

All of this extraordinary pith, however, is often buried deep in the murk of a prose style that forever seeks to emulate the later Henry James.

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