Ozick has been a fervent critic of identity politics since the nineteen-seventies ... and yet few have written so well about the inconstant self-esteem of the socially marginalized ... A brisk work of some thirty thousand words, it explores her favorite subjects—envy and ambition, the moral peril of idolatry—in her favorite form. As you might expect, it also has much to say about last things, and the long perspectives open to the human mind as it approaches its terminus ... It’s here, around the halfway point, that Ozick begins to move through the gears of her formidable imagination, introducing a tincture of magic to what has so far been a piece of fairly standard realism ... Ozick’s book about a man ensnared by history is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are. Transfixed by the unfolding spectacle of current events, the modern reader is apt to miss her richest and most subtle suggestion: that we have made an idol of the present.
Ozick’s nonfiction is sharp, layered, earnest, and extremely funny. Her essays on Sontag or Updike or Roth or Gass or Trilling ought not to resonate as they once did, but following Ozick’s arguments about decades-old literary controversies is an urgent, exhilarating experience. Perhaps it is her understanding of how language holds in its arms both our souls and our wits, the imagination and the intellect, that infuses her nonfiction with this pulse of necessity ... Fiction, on the other hand, 'is all discovery,' and hers is raucous, unexpected, passionate, and wildly original. Everything I have read (and I am still reading) hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise. The suspense of her work would be inexplicable sometimes if considering only the subject ... No matter what the topic, Ozick’s prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave. Ozick’s new novel, Antiquities , moves softly, with a tenderness and quiet intimacy that settle on a most unlikely Ozick character: Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, an elderly WASP lawyer ... Short and swift and elegant, it is also as rich and as complicated as any of Ozick’s creations ... Ozick knows to what end. She knows there is a relationship that begins within the writer and flows to the words she writes and on to her readers ... She is a writer of wild and spacious and daunting imagination, of unyielding sensitivity to the absurdities of life and to its pain, so much pain ... Freedom and volatility and irresponsibility conferred and commanded by imagination—this is a wonderful description of Ozick’s own writing, to which should be added playful intelligence, comic wisdom, eloquent abundance, the knife edge of economy, the lightness of irony, the weight of history, and finally an overarching passion—no, let’s call it love—for words in all their delicacy and power.
With Ozick, we often encounter characters who appear in fantastic guise to disrupt contemporary life. They tend to embody a fragment of Jewish history and offer a warning about the consequences of forgetting. These characters are beguiled, and frequently undone, by the enigma of memory ... Her sentences are highly caffeinated; black coffee, double shot. She is forever pulling at verbs and adjectives as if they are different colors, launching micro-experiments in form. There are paragraphs where form butts up against comprehension, and yet at the same time there is a sense of wonderment at language being so severely tested, puzzled, thrown into new meanings and shapes ... Ozick is always beckoning around the next turn. And yet when you arrive she has doubled back and changed the route, which makes for an exhilarating, and often dizzying, experience. Antiquities is a deeply intellectual meditation on memory, history, and mortality. It is breathtaking in its beauty, erudition, and evocation of a lost world.
