Ozick is also a skilled and affecting memoirist, one who wins this reader's affection by tackling the great subject of the self without ever being noxiously self-centered. 'Alfred Chester's Wig', an essay that provides a very moving portrait of a tortured soul and a perceptive look at the fifties literary and social scene, is as good a 'literary essay' (as opposed to just an essay about literature) as you are likely to read.

There are, however, some occasions where Ozick's high-style takes control and she appears to be writing simply on auto-pilot. 'Of Christian Heroism', for example, makes the point that people are fundamentally and in the main self-interested rather than good or bad and that this makes those who harboured and assisted the Jews through the persecutions of the thirties and forties exemplars rather than oridnary specimens of goodness. I think that this position is entirely defensible, even commonsensical. Yet she comes to this conclusion so messily and with so many empty rhetorical flourishes and redundancies, showing off rather than working through the counter-arguments, that she destabilizes her whole argument.

That caveat aside, however, this collection should be required reading for anyone interested in the fate of literary culture. Cynthia Ozick is one of the few modern writers who is adding to our store of literary wealth and safeguarding what has come down to us.

It is extremely frustrating that someone would dismiss Ozick as "mildly-talented" because of her refusal to compromise her artistic integrity. Ozick does not care about "hanging out" with the popular kids, nor does she toss out her Jewish heritage in light of its being "not completely feminist."

In these essays, as well as in her fiction, Ozick sets high standards for male and female writers alike. Her writing is Modern in its style, Classical in its sensibility. And never dull or uninspired.

What it was, I found, was horribly superficial and empty. These people had little to do with their time except gather at eachother's parlours and chat idlely and endlessly. But with nothing to talk about and all day to talk about it, it was considered better to sound "clever" than to have something meaningful to say; style was valued in the absense of substance. No one said what they felt, no one felt strongly about what they said, and the whole frustrating lot of them came across as a bunch of phonies. They were all but toppling over with the weight of their own pretensions.

The reason I found this frustrating, though, is that in his other works I have read (admittedly not that many), the reward for struggling through James' prose is his deeply penetrating understanding of human nature; clearly, James "gets" people, and it shows in his sharp observation and subtle wit. So that made me struggle all the more to peel back the layers of clever chatter to "get" what James was driving at, but after I turned the final unfathomable page, all I could say was "huh?"

Both novels deal with the child's / adolescent's emerging conscience, while faced with adult corruption.

In "Maisie" and "Awkward," we see James following up on his fascination with Hawthornian themes.

James's facility with dialogue, in which abrupt blushes are loaded with meaning, is apparent here. The drawing-room conversations reminded me of a party in a swimming pool; each character is constantly, in a conversational sense, "taking a plunge and coming up somewhere else."

I found this novel somewhat thin - read closely James's "Preface to the New York Edition"; can you hear James in self-defense mode?

Overall, not bad, but "Maisie's" somber and gloomy tone was better suited to the subject matter and themes than the "light and ironic" touch of "Awkward."

As examined through a brief plot summary, Washington Square contains no clear-cut revelations in its message. Upon careful investigation of the characters, however, it seems that James wants the reader to decide whether Morris' love is true or not. In other words, in terms of the main character's conflict, should Catherine have chosen her father or her lover? In the end, James has Catherine choose neither, thus carefully creating a plot that can be scrutinized from different perspectives. With each of Morris' actions, it is unclear whether he does it out of love for Catherine or out of greed for her money. The author achieves this effect by judicious word use and careful insertions of flaws in the characters of Morris Townsend and Dr. Sloper.

Washington Square was a novel I read for school after having visited Washington Square itself many times. Having said that, although it's an excellent read for literary analysis, it's also a rather dry novel. For a student wanting to complete a literary analysis and enjoy a good book at the same time, this is not good news, thus the 3.5 stars. However, its strong points are the psychological power and the keen insight James has on human nature. Read it for those things, if anything.

James allows us to perceive the motivations of each of these primary characters and we come to recognise that Catherine is in fact in danger of being deceived. The father who is not a very sympathetic character is insightful enough to do what is necessary in his view to prevent this.

The characters are all well concieved and remain true to type throughout the story.

A bonus is the setting of old New York and the scenes of a growing city are vividly drawn. Imagine a time when moving "uptown" meant moving to what is now the Village.

Overall I really enjoyed this and would highly recommend it

Although we come to realize in the first story that this will constitute a biography of sorts, it is a very different biography in that the facts seem, more often than not, to contradict themselves. Identity, in Puttermesser's world, is something very elusive and suspect. For example, we witness a conversation between Puttermesser and her Uncle Zindel only to later learn that the conversation really did not occur.

This is a surrealistic book and we learn to accommodate its contradictions. In fact, after a time, they even become rather comforting rather than disorienting. Life, after all, is full of contradictions and Ozick wisely challenges the very idea that one's life story can be set in stone and fully told. What is consciousness and what is below the surface, she seems to be asking. Is life more accurately represented by external or internal experience? Ozick shows us Ruth Puttermesser's life from both the external and the internal viewpoint and she also leaves a good many gaps in between. One thing, though, is abundantly clear: Puttermesser's life as a lawyer in the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements is, internally, far richer than it is externally.

We first encounter the eternally unattractive Ruth Puttermesser in bed, engaged in the study of the Hebrew grammar she loves so much and eating the fudgy sweets to which she seems addicted. In fact, the only thing more enticing for Puttermesser than a night of Hebrew grammar and fudge seems to be the idea of paradise, a paradise in which she envisions herself voraciously reading anything and everything she somehow managed to miss while on earth.

While waiting on paradise, however, Puttermesser must endure the day-to-day bureaucracy of city government. This is a bleak existence, but one in which Puttermesser dreams of ideals like merit and justice for all. As an independent candidate from the Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Justice party, Puttermesser dreams of running for mayor and transforming New York into a place where youth gangs wash cars for fun, where slum dwellers suddenly transform their own dwellings out of a sense of pride and nothing else and pimps decide it's high time they learn some computer skills. In short, Puttermesser dreams of transforming New York into a place that is simply not New York.

In a section entitled Puttermesser Paired, the heroine develops and idealized friendship with a younger man in which she confirms her belief that the brain is the seat of the emotions. The man, a reproduction painter, does little more than read with Puttermesser, something that fascinates them both, and their relationship is the very embodiment of George Eliot's romantic life.

The final section, Puttermesser in Paradise, is a Mobius strip and suggests that the written word is tantamount to life, itself. This is a picaresque and surreal book and one that is highly entertaining if not completely fulfilling. Sadly, I think it will appeal to only a very limited audience.

Puttermesser demonstrates this (yet never seems to see it until the end; after all she IS a rationalist) through failed love affairs, the destruction of her brilliant law career by an unqualified colleague, an initially successful but ultimately disasterous and futile tenure as the esteemed mayor of New York City, her attempts to use her legal skills to acquire citizenship for her Muscovite cousin (who in actuality only came to America to earn money), her murder and rape (in that order), and finally Ozick's final discourse, on Puttermesser and the meaning of Paradise. The same point is demonstrated as Puttermesser, a person whose thoughts are seldom erratic, besides her occasional fits of self-delusion (I remind you AGAIN, she IS a rationalist) fails yet time and time again in her very logical and carefully calculated efforts to do what every scientist and rationalist has always tried to do; to attempt to better their lives by analyzing a problem, and trying to solve it. Her motives seem attainable, well-planned, and surprisingly logical; yet she is strangely baffled, however, as reality falls short of her ideals every time.

The final passages of the book explain Puttermesser's realization (after death) that Paradise, the word she gives to the

This is a book about Justice, Love and Reading. Highly recommended.

Our view of Bruno Schulz & so many other creative artists--our very patrimony--remains blocked by the ramifications of the Nazi Holocaust. This novel provides a glimpse of that as well as intrigue, Stockholm newspaper office politics, orphancy,deception & Ozick's eidetic extrapolation of Schulz's lost Messiah. I recommend it!

. . . Yes, the novel is well written, and Ms. Ozick certainly has a highly developed vocabulary... or at least she has access to a good thesaurus. . . .

The main point of the book is that while some of us dream, strive and struggle for intellectual greatness, we usually wind up being just a bunch of ordinary folks. How silly, how depressing! What unrealistic, high falootin' ideas of greatness this woman has! She illustrates her idea of ordinariness by telling us that unless we're great we're doomed to be mere "plumbers". Don't plumbers think? She never passes up a chance to heft her great intellectual superiority complex on the lower forms of life that she and, apparantly, her characters are destined to rub elbows with.

I found Ozick's tone infuriatingly patronizing and false. What all the hubbub about her is all about, I'll never understand.

Sadly, ill fortune is the real major theme of the work. Job suffers radical hardship throughout. The consolation offered by his associates is insufficient, for Job, in explaining his predicament. Since Job is linked to the Bible, the story moves to answer his trauma, with a vision from Yahweh that is at least equal in magnitude to his radical suffering. This vision 'From the Whirlwind' works to shape Job through the effects of awe and assurance.

The work closes by Job receiving twice the value of what he had initially lost, as a restoration gesture. Indeed, it is difficult for a delicate sensibility to reflect further on the significance and suggested meanings portrayed by such a work. For what effect does such radical trauma have on the psyche's sense of security or the validity and reality of shared tenderness?

Can merely having 'more good' than what we have had before repair what was lost, to our disposition, by the experience?