When more is less

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James.

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors.

In James’s novel, the middle-aged Lambert Strether is dispatched by a New England matriarch to bring home her son from Paris, where he’s apparently fallen for an older woman. In Ozick’s, the middle-aged Bea Nightingale (née Nachtigall) is dispatched by her overbearing brother Marvin to do the same for his son Julian, whose own older woman she soon finds out about.

Unlike Strether, though, Bea certainly isn’t beguiled by the superiority of Europe. It is, after all, 1952 — when a Parisian heatwave seems ‘a remnant of the recent war, as if the continent itself had been turned into a region of hell’. The city is also packed with Jewish survivors. These include Lili, Julian’s Romanian wife, who’s clearly learned the dark lessons that America has been spared. (‘There is something different in the faces of Americans,’ another survivor reflects. ‘A look of — how to name it? — exemption.’)

Even so, Bea’s rescue mission fails. Marvin’s mood, never very cheery, is then further blackened when his daughter Iris joins Julian and Lili in the Old World. From there, the narrative darts in all directions, setting up any number of moral dilemmas, and providing back-stories for everybody concerned, however peripherally.