Cuerpos extraños

by Cynthia Ozick, Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino (Translator)

Una mujer de mediana edad parece andar sin rumbo por las calles de París en una tarde de calor asfixiante de finales de julio de 1952. Finalmente se sienta en un bar, pide un zumo y pregunta al camarero si por casualidad conoce a un tal Julian. No es la primera vez que lo hace, pero nadie recuerda a ese chico norteamericano de pelo rubio y aspecto desaliñado, que un buen día dejó su casa de California para viajar por Europa e instalarse en París, lejos de un padre intransigente y una madre que se ha refugiado en la locura para aliviar el deber de vivir.
Quien busca y pregunta es su tía Bea, dispuesta a llevárselo de vuelta y hacer de él un hombre de provecho, pero cuando finalmente la mujer descubra el paradero de Julian, habrá algo insólito esperándole: otros cuerpos, otras voces, reclamándole una nueva versión del amor. Lejos de su tierra y abrumada al principio por el desorden que aun arrasa Europa tras la guerra, Bea ahora quiere comprender, y lo que había empezado como un simple viaje acaba siendo una lección de sabiduría.
Gran admiradora de Henry James, Cynthia Ozick rinde aquí su particular homenaje al gran autor de Los embajadores con una novela donde el talento está en los detalles.

«Una novela llena de perspicacia, que Henry James hubiera aplaudido.»
The New York Times

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Literature, Book Club

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2010

About the author

Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.

Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

A Goodreads friend posted a review of Henry James' The Ambassadors recently. The review was just a few lines so it shouldn't have made any noise in my mind but since it concerned one of my favourite James novels, it lingered in my thoughts and reminded me of a book that has been lying unread for too long. I had bought Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies after I read The Ambassadors in 2016 because another Goodreads friend had suggested that Ozick's book might make a good follow-up, but then I moved on to other Henry James books and Foreign Bodies seemed to have missed its moment.

Now I have finally read it, and I have seen for myself how it mirrors the plot of Henry James's book: she had journeyed out as a kind of ambassador, she had turned into a spy against every ingrained expectation.
That mirroring was certainly interesting but it was the parts of Ozick's story that were unrelated to HJ's plot that impressed me the most. However, her story didn't catch my attention immediately—I had difficulty engaging with the book at the beginning, which I blamed on the quarantine we are living through, and on the new habit I've developed of checking WhatsApp messages every other minute.

It wasn't until about half way through Ozick's story, that a short scene of only a few lines caused the book to finally make a great noise in my mind. The scene involved the main character, who is considered unmusical, touching another character's precious piano :
She was splaying the fingers of her left hand, the right she had curled into a knob. The left plunged like a lion’s maw into the bass, the fist crashed down on the treble. The sound was tremendous, the sound was august, it was a thunder, a chorus of tragical gods, it was out of the deeps, it was out of the sky, it was hail, it was flung stones, it was majesty! It was the opening bars of the symphony he was yet to write. He stomped his foot to shake off the pain. The shame was his own.

When I read that scene, I remembered an earlier one involving a character striking a piano key. I went back and reread the earlier section and had a confirmation of what I'd just begun to realise: Cynthia Ozick, though a careful and disciplined writer, has a wildness at her core. This seemingly tame story has more than a hint of rebellion in it but it is not the obvious candidates who actually rebel. No, the most rebellious character is a quiet middle-aged school teacher. It is she who makes the real noise in this story.

The title is very well chosen too. We are forced to remember what it must have been like to be Jewish in Europe in the middle decades of the twentieth century—and I'm talking about after WWII, not before.

An alternative meaning for the title can be found in the current situation of the main character. The school in which she teaches is in a rough neighbourhood in New York, and the boys she teaches can't identify with the English literature texts she tries to share with them. Literature is completely foreign to their everyday lives. But there comes a moment when it strikes her that the boys and the literature may not be so foreign to each other after all. It occurred in the following passage which rang out in my mind like a powerful chord crashing down on a piano:

She sat at her desk in her deserted classroom, red pencil biting down. A rainy dusk blurred the big windows, and the rows of empty seats exhaled the mingled malodors of young males. Under her hand were her class’s Shakespeare reports: misperceptions, misspellings, verbs and commas running wild, wrong turnings everywhere. A starvation of words. Still, she detected in this thicket of blots and brambles a subterranean mindfulness: at home they knew Iago and Goneril and Edmund and Lear, they knew their simulacra, they knew fear, they knew rage. They had seen into the tragic, and she was not ashamed of their errors. Their errors were short-lived paper phantoms; but they were skilled and manly boys, and they would not live paper lives. Her red pencil could not demean them.

There is no starvation of words in this book! Bravo, Cynthia Ozick.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ozick's writing is lovely. Its subject and many of its sentiments are ugly. I know it’s often considered acceptable to lambast your own when you’re alone together but in 1950’s France and, let’s face it, even now, it was too soon to denigrate Jews who’d lost everyone and everything they’d loved just because they were so broken. In Ozick’s book the sleights are almost uglier because they’re coming from a second generation immigrant who’s acting on his sense of shame from coming from what he considers a low position as well as a need to blend in with WASPdom at the expense of his children’s happiness. Marvin goes to Harvard where he marries his roommate’s debutante sister and has two children, Iris and Justin. Though Marvin makes a name for himself and lots of money he’s disappointed especially with Justin but also with his life and his trophy wife. Knowing this 19 year old Justin escapes to France where he comes into contact with exactly the type of people whose influence Marvin fears. The ‘Ambassador’ Marvin marshals to the front is his estranged sister, Bea, who the kids have had virtually no contact with.

I was drawn to this book because of the Henry James’ “Ambassadors” tie in. I love James and loved “Ambassadors” though many of his characters were less than stellar people; insular, obsessed with status, dismissive of other cultures, etc. There are many plot and theme overlaps between “Foreign Bodies” and “Ambassadors” however the real commonality is that in order to enjoy both Ozick and James you must give yourself over to their worldview, fall into its rhythm. The difference is that “Foreign Bodies”, though I enjoyed reading it, leaves an after taste in your mouth that makes you feel small minded while “Ambassadors” expands your thinking….even as you would not want to step into one of his dramas. Having said all this I did enjoy Ozick’s book very much. Her characterizations are dead on and, as I said, she writes beautifully.

This review was based on an eBook supplied by the publisher.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Where is the Thrall?

This is the least engaging of the three Cynthia Ozick novels that I've read...though it has much to recommend it, and you might still enjoy it more than I did.

The first ("The Messiah of Stockholm") had me enthralled from beginning to end. But, with this novel, the thrall hardly started.

It's well known that the novel was inspired by Henry James' "The Ambassadors" and that it might be "a photographic negative" of the novel that inspired it.

I read a number of Henry James novels in my early teens, at the suggestion of my English teacher, but I would have to re-read "The Ambassadors" to comprehend the deeper relationship between the two novels.

Whatever, it's this relationship that constitutes, for me, the main appeal of Ozick's novel. It's a methodical exercise in metafiction. The rest of its qualities (e.g., the [occasionally pedestrian] prose, which lacks lustre, dynamism and drive, and fails to propel the novel onwards [or upwards] towards its conclusion, despite the short sentences, paragraphs and chapters) are relatively light-weight and, for me, disappointing, especially compared with the qualities of Ozick's earlier fiction.

Ambassadors and Emissaries

In James' novel, the first of multiple ambassadors is Lewis Lambert Strether, a fifty-ish gentleman who visits fin-de-siecle Paris for the first time, to rescue the son of his fiancee, Mrs Newsome. Strether finds Paris alluring and its inhabitants refined and charming. When it seems that he is taking his time in his mission, Mrs Newsome sends fresh ambassadors to Paris (hence the plural of the title).

In Ozick's novel, the ambassador is a woman, Bea Nightingale, a 48 year old teacher and divorcee from New York, whose former husband (Leo) was a small-time, but ambitious, composer of film music. She is sent to Paris in 1952 by her boorish engineer brother, a self-made businessman, Marvin Nachtigal (he hasn't Anglicised his Jewish surname), to recover his son and her bookish would-be poet nephew, Julian.

Marvin addresses no man (or woman) as an equal, and is arrogant, autocratic, dictatorial, domineering, egotistical, self-satisfied and obnoxious. We learn much about his method of communication, and the reason Julian and his sister Iris despise him so much, from the many letters he writes to Bea, always demanding and offending at the same time. Marvin pretends that his wife, Margaret, is going insane and has her hospitalised in an institution in Los Angeles.


Source

Sophistication Versus Practicality

Marvin regards the United States as a new world and a land of capitalist opportunity ("what's new is good, workable, efficient. Engineered"), while Europe and Paris, in particular, are an old world that has ossified, become decadent and wasted its opportunities.

"Marvin was afraid of Europe. He was afraid of Paris. Bea saw in him a kind of terrorised primitive - his Paris was no more than the platitudes of the postcards, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe; and grimly below, diseased and bloody dungeons engulfing his boy..."

In contrast to Julian (and, eventually, Bea), Marvin extols science above art, literature, music and culture. Paris threatens to knock Julian off the track that would make him a successful businessman in Marvin's image. Marvin is determined to make Julian a replica or carbon copy of himself, and to deny to him the opportunity to make his own life choices:

"Julian was homeless and jobless and reckless and rash."

"Julian's hopeless. He doesn't apply himself, he's a parasite, he hasn't got an ounce of practicality, he doesn't know what he wants, no focus, too emotional..."

"There was no way to escape [their] father: he lived inside [their brains]. She saw that Julian had chosen Europe. He meant to stay. He would never come home."

The World's Couplings

In Paris, Julian has a relationship with (and soon marries) an older, but poorer, Romanian refugee called Lili, a language teacher, who has been previously married and had a child. She believes she will "do him [Julian] good":

"What she taught him was Europe. She thickened his mind. And he entered her body, gratefully."

Marvin, even from a distance, is determined to deny and frustrate this relationship, as if Lili was some kind of gold-digger, intent on taking his (Marvin's) wealth:

"People who've gone through all that over there have to be practical, they take what they can get."

"You mention a girl...Julian is twenty-three years old. At this age to get himself mixed up with some girl over there is not what I have in mind for my son."

The Nightingale's Turn

Julian's peer group in Paris isn't portrayed as from the same refined background as Henry James' characters, but (apart from the Americans) they are largely decent people, even if they have suffered during wartime and the Holocaust. They would be equally decent, when they emigrated to America as refugees.

While Julian, Lili and Iris don't welcome Bea to Paris ("she was a messenger, an emissary,...Marvin's surrogate"), Bea does feel some empathy towards them, which eventually softens her apparently hard and world-weary exterior ("She had witnessed shiftings, mutiny, young rebels in flight. The crisis of the untried, the past defied. Turnings!"). She even discovers a new-found respect for Leo and his now-finished symphony.


SOUNDTRACK:

Dave Graney & the Coral Snakes - "You Wanna Be There, But You Don't Wanna Travel"

https://youtu.be/ztnZV79WDjY

Smells like tween spirit...


Dave Graney & the Coral Snakes - "You Wanna Be There, But You Don't Wanna Travel (Live)"

https://youtu.be/kD4VMwd6JCU

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many critics slaved over the comparison of Foreign Bodies to Henry James The Ambassadors. It's been so long since I've read Ambassadors that it did not affect my experience with this novel. Instead all my attention focused on the ordinary yet intriguing characters of Bea, Lilly and Iris (not Julian or Marvin, as much). I marvel at the imagination, insight and skill of a writer who can spin together just the right threads to create the whole cloth character that seems a living, breathing human. One whose external life seems commonplace (like a 40 yr old high school teacher) but whose INTERNAL life grabs and holds my interest and concern. Yet, I could still see the individual's flaws and mistakes and shake my head over the poor decisions each one made. I didn't have to identify with the character in order to be deeply involved for the whole novel.
Through most of the book, I found myself focusing on the fleshing out of the two words in the title, foreign and bodies.
How were the characters foreign - to themselves, to others, to a fully experienced life? There are so many ways that the three women, especially, show that they haven't figured out much about themselves, though they are self-involved, like most of us. They are also unable to figure out the people they claim to love. Foreigners in many ways.
What was the scope of the word bodies? There is much description and reflection on the physical bodies - attractive, scarred, ghost-like -
and reflection on what it meant to be touching or never touched. I'm still thinking about them.
Finally, the best part for me is Ozick's carefully chosen language. I listened to the book (from Audible) and therefore experienced the writer's words with my brain AND my ears. It was wonderful. Sometimes I stopped the recording to hear a section again. Her phrases, usually the metaphors, are so "spot on";
you get the picture, the meaning clearly and with just a few beautifully chosen words.
It's probably not necessary to say this, but I will. If you need a fast-paced, action packed book, skip this one. However, if you want to savor
expertly crafted character and hear the language of an artist, do read Foreign Bodies.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ozick creates a negative imaging of Henry James's The Ambassadors with the kind of deft touch only she has. Her decision to parallel James's plot while reversing its meaning pays off in spades. Aunt Bea is sent to Paris by her class-obsessed brother Marvin in order to retrieve his son Julian, who has been over there galavanting with all the other Americans playing at exile like some sort of game.

They gathered in the cafes to gossip and slander and savor the old tales of the lost generation, and to scorn what they had left behind. They rotated lovers of either sex and played at existentialism and founded avant-garde journals in which they published one another and bragged of having sighted Sartre at the Deux Magots, and were proudly, relentlessly, unremittingly conscious of their youth. Unlike that earlier band of expatriates, who had grown up and gone home, these intended to stay young in Paris forever. They made up a little city of shining white foreheads; but their teeth were stained from too much whiskey and wine, and too many powerful French cigarettes. They spoke only American. Their French was bad.

Paris holds no allure for Bea and she ends up siding with her nephew and niece almost immediately in sympathetic opposition to their pompous father. The first half feels closely plotted to James's work with comically opposite undertones ("life-giving" French bathroom decor thanks to its Americanized faux-fixtures, disintegrating family relations, outright deception and lying, culture as corrupter, etc.), while the second half opens up into its own, so to speak. This comical cast of characters stumble across a stage beset with European decay and post-war complications, as each becomes a sort of foreign body in their own way and in their own lives. Wonderfully written and incredibly constructed, its only drawback may be that it feels like it trods down somewhat too-familiar Ozick family/social dynamics, as if she is, in part, repeating herself.
-----------------------------------------
WORDS I LEARNED WHILE READING THIS BOOK
seigneurial | peruke | pellucid | lubricious | ukase | vitrine | chatelaine | factotum | harridan | ormolu | plenipotentiary | gaudium | dishabille | argot | sostenuto | sforzando

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies is the first book I read completely on my smartphone while riding the bus from NYC to my home in NJ. As much as I had hoped to like reading on my Kindle (or my smartphone Kindle app), I found that looking at a series of screens is not the same as turning paper pages in a book. It’s somehow harder to keep the whole of the book in mind while only the smallest smidgen of it shows itself. So I pretty much choose to read every book in paper format. But when faced with time alone on a darkened bus, reading on my cell seemed like a good way to spend my riding time.

Fortunately, Ozick is such a skilled writer I repeatedly described my experience of reading Foreign Bodies as one of sliding along on a creamy river of words. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t sure of my place in the book; just being there was pleasure enough. Not that the book isn’t clearly structured, but the “what” of it all just doesn’t feel as important as soaking in the ambience. It’s no secret that this book is a response to Henry James’s The Ambassadors. While the twisting changes of plot and character make this an interesting response to another great book, it is Ozick’s version of James’s silken prose that seems most important. Or maybe that’s just what you experience most directly when you read a brilliantly written novel one small screen at a time.

However people read, electronically or paper, fans of Henry James style writing will find Ozick a worthy daughter of the great man with a focus and distinct and distinctly beautiful style all her own.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 I didn't care for it, but I did want to finish it.

Prior to this, I'd only read Ozick's short story "The Shawl". I was impressed with it, so I'd been meaning to read more of her for awhile now: perhaps this novel wasn't the place for me to continue an Ozick journey.

Only the first few pages drew me in and it took me much longer to read a novel of this length than it usually would. I hardly ever felt compelled to pick it up, though it read easily enough. If I wasn't writing this review, the book would end up one of those I'd forget easily; and years from now, I wouldn't be sure if I'd read it or not.

That it's a rewriting of Henry James' The Ambassadors, I would've recognized immediately even if it wasn't stated on the inner flap. It's also stated there that "the meaning is reversed", as if the reader needs to be told that, and I'm afraid I did. The only reversed meaning I found is that while James' Strether has scrupulous integrity, Bea doesn't. In a novel with major elements I didn't believe in -- Bea's brother's letters, as well as some of his daughter's, and Bea's emotional attachment to her ex-husband -- reversed meaning wasn't enough to make this memorable.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 2 out of 5]

A friend described this book to me in the following way: "Well, I didn't like it and I didn't get it, but maybe it's just too American." This book IS indeed American in the sense that the main characters are American and the author is America -- and some of it is set in America, although quite a lot of it is set in 1950s Paris -- but I didn't like it or get it, either. Even though I'm American. I didn't really understand the point of the characters OR the story. None of it seemed real. The writing was obviously good, in a technical way, but it never managed to involve me in the story; indeed, in some way that I can't be bothered to actually identify, it actually distanced me from it. Short-listed for lots of literary awards, but frankly I wouldn't recommend this novel.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a lot of trouble with the book. Ms. Ozick is obsessed with using multiple adjectives and multiple metaphors when she's referring to one thing or one action. It felt overdone for my taste. The writing seemed sophomoric. The characters had almost no nuance. Marvin was all bad. Bea was all doormat. Julius all weakness. Lilly all saint. The theme about family didn't pan out. There was no substance or even grit to make the case. The symbolism around inanimate objects didn't work either. There wasn't near enough emotionality or emotional history to sustain the symbolism. You never really learn why anyone does what they do or what they did. People...just do things, say things and I was like "why would she keep putting up with that?" "Why would she suddenly do that?" The only person we really get any emotional history from is Lilly. The book succeeds to a little extent with Lilly. Her foreignness is presented very stereotypically, but she's portrayed accurately to the picture America probably had of foreigners from "far away places" in 1952/1953.

I see some reviewers thought the pace was "snappy." I never thought so. I thought the pace was awkward and inappropriate. Inappropriate in her attempts to build suspense. Some may like the device where you use 5 metaphors and describe every piece of furniture in the room and a complete weather forecast right in the middle of an important dialogue. It was aggravating for me and sometimes I just skimmed on all together. I would not recommend the book.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to love this book. Cynthia Ozick is an incredibly gifted writer, and Henry James' "The Ambassadors," the explicit inspiration for this book, is one of my all-time favorite novels. Yet despite some beautifully-written passages, it doesn't come off. At times, especially when the main character's blustering brother Marvin appears (mostly through a series of imperious letters), "Foreign Bodies" reads almost like a spoof or parody of "The Ambassadors," while at other times, as in the references to the horrors that Lili (Marvin's son's secret wife) and her family experienced during the war, the tone becomes almost as grim as that of Ozick's classic novella, "The Shawl." This vacilation in mood and tone makes it hard to really get into the story. But for me, the more fundamental problem is that ultimately neither the plot nor the characters are sufficiently convincing for me to care about them. Maybe that's inevitable in modeling this book so closely on James' masterpiece--both the story and the charcters are by their very nature contrived; or maybe it's that, in choosing "The Ambassadors" as her model, Ozick has, in this case, simply set the bar too high for herself.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cynthia Ozick, author of The Shawl and Trust: A Novel, two of my favorite books, has written a gem of a novel in Foreign Bodies. A slithering and taut comedy of errors, this book examines issues of betrayal and trust, literal and emotional exile, regret and rage, Judaism in post-World War II Europe and the meaning of art in one's life. While based on themes similar to Henry James' The Ambassadors, this novel is distinctly and uniquely Ozick's.

It is 1952 and 48 year-old Bea Nightingale has been teaching English to boys in a technical school for decades. They are more interested in other things than Shakespeare and Dickens but Bea gives it her best shot each semester. Once briefly married to Leo, a composer and pianist, Bea has been divorced for decades and Leo has gone on to do very well as a composer of scores for Hollywood movies. After Leo left Bea, he also left his grand piano which takes up a huge place in Bea's small Manhattan apartment and symbolizes several things to her - regret, the importance of art, and betrayal. Leo was supposed to pick up the piano and never did. It has sat untouched for years, an homage to Bea's anger and loss, along with its symbolic meaning of art as creation.

One day, out of the blue, Bea gets a letter from her semi-estranged brother, Marvin, asking her to to find his son Julian, an ex-pat who took a college year abroad and has not returned after three years. Marvin is a legend in his own mind, an arrogant, controlling, rude man who has made his fortune in airline parts in California. His wife Margaret, is a blue-blood who Marvin met at Princeton when he was there on scholarship. She is now in a rehab center ostensibly because the loss of Julian has sent her over the edge. Julian was always the lost child, the one who Marvin considered a loss. He had his head in the clouds and his desire was to write though Marvin wanted him to become a scientist. He has one other child, Iris, who is on the mark and following Marvin's goals for her to become a scientist. Marvin tells Bea in his letter, that he knows she is going on holiday to Paris and he'd like her to look up Julian and get him to come home. He feels that she must do this for what else does she do in her life but teach thugs. (As a matter of clarity, Marvin's last name is Nachtigal and Bea's is Nightingale. She changed her name because she thought it would be easier for her students to pronounce).

On Bea's trip to Paris, she makes two minor attempts at the end of her trip to contact Julian but is unsuccessful. He has already left his apartment and his where-abouts are unknown. Bea returns to New York and gets a scathing letter from Marvin all but ripping her to shreds. How she is able to stand his abuse is a comment on her own sense of self-deprecation. Marvin has a new idea. His daughter Iris is close to Julian and knows him well. He will send Iris to Bea's for a few days and she will tell Bea all about Julian and then Bea will again venture to Paris 'knowing' Julian and better able to find him. What ends up happening however is the beginning of a long line of betrayals for which Bea is responsible. Iris does come to New York but instead of Bea going to Paris, Iris goes and Bea makes up a story to Marvin about what is happening. Whatever Bea touches comes back inside-out.

Iris writes to Bea and tells her she plans to stay in Paris. Bea goes back to Paris, this time in search of Iris as well as Julian. What Bea finds in Europe is that Julian is married to Lili, a Romanian holocaust survivor several years older than him. He works part-time in cafes and lives on the money that Marvin sends him. Julian and Iris want nothing to do with Bea and give her the cold shoulder. Instead of returning to Manhattan, Bea impulsively flies to California and contacts her ex-husband, starting off a chain of events that leads to artistic obsession. She also contacts Margaret in her rest home which also leads to dire consequences.

Bea's betrayals are numerous and though often done with good intentions, end up with horrible repercussions. She is passive in her life but feels like she is able to take control when it comes to others. She has this grandiose sense of what is right for those around her. Bea gives a lot of thought to exile and sense of place and these themes resonate throughout the book. While Julian has chosen to exile himself from his father emotionally and as an ex-patriate, Marvin then chooses to exile Julian from his life unless Julian is willing to take a bribe and come home. Bea again intervenes and betrays Marvin. It is hard to see what is going on in Bea's mind but there are a lot of deep feelings, especially anger, rage, and regret. While her actions might seem magnanimous to her, they often seem controlling, misguided and horrific to the reader.

Cynthia Ozick has created a small treasure with this novel. Its twists and turns, keeping the reader enthralled and emotionally transfixed. We are led through a maze of human frailty, often disguised as strength, as we are swept away with the undercurrents of duplicity and displacement. This is a must-read for Ozick fans and, for those not familiar with her writing, a good place to start.

[Kristine Brancolini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foreign Bodies is populated with some of the most unlikeable characters I have encountered in quite some time, but I loved this book. I've been trying to analyze why since I finished it yesterday. I can't believe this is my first Cynthia Ozick book. She is a wonderful writer. The plot is loosely based upon The Ambassadors, but now I'm dying to re-read that book because I believe that the links between the two books are substantial.

Ozick has created a cast of fascinating characters, with brother and sister Marvin Nachtigal and Bea Nightingale, at the top of the list. At first Marvin seems despicable and odious, and Bea seems rather benign, but then she begins to reveal herself. They are Jews, but Marvin has married a Gentile and seems to be contemptuous of Jews. Bea is a high school English teacher in her late 40s. She has been married to Leo, the cousin of her best friend Laura. At the time the book is set, they are long divorced and Leo has become a composer for the movies. The reader never learns when, why or how they separated, and I found that the mystery gave the book interesting tension. Foreign Bodies also features another brother and sister, Marvin's son Julian and daughter Iris. Julian is something of an enigma, but I found Iris to be one of the most sympathetic characters in the book. And then there's Julian's wife Lili, a 30-something Romanian Holocaust survivor living in Paris when she meets 23-year-old Julian. It's 1952 and he's missed the 1920s by quite a bit, but Julian is attempting to become a writer, while living on first his father and then his wife. Lili works at a center for displaced persons and the center's benefactor is a Jew who may have been a collaborator. Eventually Julian and Lili make their way to New York, but they don't stay there long and soon disappear.

The entire book revolves around Bea, who is really not who she seems to be at the beginning. On the second to the last page, Ozick writes:

"She [Bea] thought: How hard it is to change one's life.
And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.
As flies to wanton boys."

That passage perfectly characterizes Bea. This is a deceptively brilliant book. Ozick is an expert in Henry James. I read The Ambassadors a long time ago, so I re-read some reviews of it. A reviewer commented: "His [James'] characters -- even [protagonist] Lambert Strether -- seem not to grow, but rather simply to reveal more of themselves, as one reveals the inner layers of an onion." That's precisely what Ozick achieves with Bea. Foreign Bodies was short-listed for the Orange Prize this year. That's not surprising at all.

[Magdelanye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps I expected too much, was so pleased to find something by this author,of whom quite recently I have read excellent reviews. Perhaps it was the rather turgid writing,obscure and convoluted rather than bouyant and clear.Maybe it was just the lack of sympathy that I felt for any of the characters,including the smug narrator. Unlikely as the premises of the plot, given that,I felt much more could have been done to convey the moral lessons that the reader is asked to explore.
But I didn´t really like this book.

[Allyson · Rating 2 out of 5]

She is really a wonderful writer with a unique presentation and style. However I did not rate this higher as I liked none of the characters, not at all or even a little bit. They all had significant flaws and I found the reading experience unpleasant as they were just all so annoying. I did not care really what happened to any of them although I was curious enough to finish the rather short book and had hopes that they would change a little or something other than what they were throughout.
I have never read The Ambassadors by Henry James so have no idea whether an antipathy toward all characters is a hallmark of his book but for a reader, it is strongly dissatisfying. I have read 2 of her short stories and vaguely remember a similar feeling after those as well.
A shame as I really like her style with words, but her characters are too mean, lazy, unaware, unfair, too everything negative and not even a little opposite to outweigh the overall wearying feel.

[Lara Maynard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh the tangled web of Aunt Bea! -- and Marvin, Julian, Iris, Lili, Leo and Margaret. Foreign Bodies has elements of dark comedy, of coming-of-age, of the immigrant novel, of pathos and of family drama. Displacement, deception, interference, interconnection. This is a literary novel for lovers of writerly writing, and will likely offer a few new words for your vocabulary along with the memorable characters of the fairly messed up Nachtigall/Nightingale family in America and abroad in France.

I have not (yet) read The Ambassadors, the 1903 novel by Henry James which Foreign Bodies retells (according to the back cover of this edition of Ozick's book). Nor have I (yet) read other books or stories by Oznick. Foreign bodies makes me want to read more of both authors.

[Rhiannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not wait for it to end.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Foreign Bodies, a novel by Cynthia Ozick, Bea and Marvin are estranged middle-aged siblings, Bea a teacher, Marvin a tycoon; Bea a New Yorker, Marvin now a Californian. Marvin has no right in the world to demand that Bea drop everything and find out what's going on with his twenty-something son, Julian, in Paris. But that's what he does. And Bea subverts her summer trip a bit to accommodate his wishes.



She gets nowhere. Throughout the novel Bea plays a role analogous to Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. She is a diplomat reaching out to and trying to understand not only Julian, but Julian's wife, Lili; Julian's sister, Iris; Marvin's estranged wife, Margaret; and Bea's own ex-husband Leo. Her job is to moderate family passions and alienation and assist Marvin in keeping, ultimately, both of his children from sliding back into the maw of Europe that his and Bea's parents and grandparents' escaped at great cost.



Initially Marvin is a caricature of a Jewish bully: My way or the highway. He comes on so strong that I winced, wondering if Ozick was simply unable to control the kind of figure that Bellow and Roth presented ably and often. But Marvin's role diminishes as the roles of the other characters grows.



This is an entertaining novel because it moves from expository passages to letters to dramatized scenes as the need presents itself. The focus shifts among the characters. Even Bea becomes an ensemble player, although she's the heroine of the plot. In this way the story gets told efficiently and colorfully and tangents become structural supports for further plot and character development.



Ozick's writing abounds in short sentences, exclamations, adjectives after adjectives, and questions, questions, questions. It also is utterly idiosyncratic, full of peculiarly apt but utterly novel formulations a reader has never before encountered but understands instantly.



At one point someone who is upset feelings grinding under her heart. What grinds under hearts? Is there some lathe or sander or magneto in there I didn't know about? But Ozick would have it this way, and so it is this way.



Here's another clumsy but effective sentence: "Her spine felt drilled through; her brain still swarmed with fearsome dream-shreds retreating into oblivion."



Watch out for those dream-shreds! Take aspirin fast if you had such a bad night your spine feels drilled through!



As the story progresses, it wears away at Marvin's outlandish pretensions and plans. His kids will live their lives, not his, which hasn't been that happy even if he's made a ton of money. And Bea's ex-husband somehow is made to produce a symphonic homage to Bea, something like a peace offering, despite the fact that Bea is utterly tone deaf. In other words, things become more human, more life-centered, more settled within themselves, not within inherited fears and suspicions.



The quote Ozick uses from James's The Ambassadors at the outset suggests such goings on can lead either to becoming brutalized or becoming refined. With her quick wit, quirky style, and fast pace, Ozick has fun driving things in the direction of refinement.

For more of my comments on contemporary fiction, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my style
Gave up after 100 pages
Aunt trying to find her nephew in paris

[Silvanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dull, dull, dull. Couldn't finish it.

[Pilar de Zaragoza · Rating 3 out of 5]

En la sección de libros de una revista dominical descubrí a Cynthia Ozick. La recensión que se hacía de su obra, Cuerpos extraños, no decía gran cosa, pero a la autora se la calificaba de “biógrafa de los judíos”, motivo suficiente para despertar mi interés y comprar el libro.

Cynthia Ozick es una judía neoyorkina situada en la fila de los eternos aspirantes al premio Nobel. En Cuerpos extraños desarrolla un argumento muy sencillo: protagonistas que forman parte de un núcleo familiar reducido cuyas relaciones sociales son igualmente limitadas; un padre de dos hijos autoritario y manipulador y algunos otros personajes que, en principio, parecen secundarios y a medida que avanza la obra adquieren dimensión propia. La tía Bea, modesta en su perfil y largo tiempo desconectada de la familia, abre y desenvuelve la trama a través de un epistolario sin connotaciones psicológicas personales. Bea, a pesar de la distancia física y afectiva que la separa de su familia, es encargada por su hermano de transmitir a sus sobrinos –que experimentan la vida por su cuenta– los deseos de su padre, siempre encaminados a dirigirles la vida.

Nada se explicita ni se trata en profundidad; sin embargo, el lector se compromete, in crescendo, con el desenlace de los conflictos planteados. El lenguaje no siempre resulta fácil, pues frases y párrafos se ven interrumpidos por incisos; no obstante, la utilización del estilo epistolar, sabiamente introducido en el relato, confiere a la novela ese punto de cercanía que no se percibe en sus comienzos.

El libro concluye con las vidas y los conflictos abiertos, aunque sorprende que el personaje menos brillante termine siendo el más acabado y contundente. No estamos ante una obra maestra, pero sí ante una novela bien construida que se lee con interés.

[Liliana Blum · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una maravilla como todo lo que he leído de esta autora.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having recently read Henry James's The Ambassadors , and having written a few essays over the years on Cynthia Ozick, I could hardly neglect to read Ozick's 2010 novel, Foreign Bodies. It's strangely billed on the book jacket as "a photographic negative" of the James novel, in which "the plot is the same but the meaning is reversed." I say "strangely" because neither novel has a simple, one-dimensional meaning.

In James's book, a turn-of-the-century American WASP middle-aged man is sent by his prospective wife to Paris to retrieve his soon-to-be stepson; there he finds that the young man has been civilized and refined by his quietly illicit relationship with an older married French aristocrat. Ozick moves the action to the early 1950s. In her story, a middle-aged American Jewish woman is sent by her brother to Paris to retrieve her nephew; she finds that the young man has been initiated into a mature knowledge of death by his marriage to a Romanian Jewish Holocaust survivor.

If "the meaning is reversed" from the earlier to the later book, it may be because James seems to exalt European civilization above mercenary American values, whereas Ozick implicitly condemns Europe for its destruction of the Jews and envisions America as a refuge or haven for the persecuted. To say this, though, is to miss Ozick's own satire on American crassness—Foreign Bodies portrays assimilated upwardly-mobile American Jews as coarse and shallow—and to ignore James's eye for the sexual corruption of a European elite that imprisons women in quasi-arranged power-play marriages.

It's tempting to read Foreign Bodies as a novel in the Wide Sargasso Sea subgenre: rewriting a canonical work from a marginal perspective to reveal the oppressive exclusions of hegemonic narrative. But that isn't really Ozick's style, especially because the academic verbiage would make her vomit. I suspect she sees herself as sharing James's values or at least the inner quarrel between the things he values most—his somewhat contradictory passions for art and for human kindness—but testing them in a very different scenario.

Ozick's heroine is Bea Nightingale (Anglicized from the German Nachtigall, which means the same thing), a divorced public high school English teacher of about 50 years old who lives in New York City. Her estranged brother Marvin, a wealthy businessman—"a dedicated Californian…a Tory (a Republican, in fact), an American Bourbon, an American Borgia!"—asks her to go to Paris to find his errant son. His daughter Iris, an aspiring scientist, also goes to Europe, ostensibly to bring Julian home but really using his flight as an excuse for her own. In Paris, both Iris and Bea separately discover that Julian has married an older woman named Lili. The mysterious wound on her arm, the furrows between her eyes that look like train tracks, her work at a resettlement agency for displaced persons, the husband and child she's lost—all these testify, literally and symbolically, that she's a survivor. As do her nightmares, as Iris overhears:

Lili's bad dreams made a strange piping, and sometimes a harsh grim grunt, or even a metallic click, like the cocking of a trigger. Only Julian knew why.

Ozick refrains from making it explicit or obscene—she decorously negotiates the famously impossible relation between poetry and Auschwitz—but what we need to know is implied with Jamesian subtlety. And just as James's hero finds his young quarry elevated by his Parisian affair, so Bea discovers Julian matured out of the California callowness instilled by his father as a result of Lili's love: "he had married a woman who was teaching him the knowledge of death."

"My impression is one of enduring gravity and endurance," she writes to her brother of his son's transformation, as she reflects that "she had come to side with the party of the far horizon," where this horizon is presumably more metaphysical—an awareness of death and suffering—than Europe considered in James's style as a mind-expanding higher civilization. Lili herself affirms to Bea:

"I am already one hundred years, yes! But I am for him. I do him good, is this how you say it? I do him good. […] He becomes less and less a boy. At the same time he is a man."

Despite this evidence of Julian's growth, Bea also worries that the poetic young man is somehow preying on his wife's terrible experiences, reflecting an anxiety that the American artist writing about the Holocaust necessarily exploits its victims for mere aesthetics: "Had he also suckled on the black milk of her nightmares?" The "black milk" image of a corrupted maternity alludes to Paul Celan's "Death Fugue,", the most famous of poems about the Holocaust. Celan contrasts ideal German aesthetics in the shining figure of Goethe's Margaret with Jewish femininity pictured as the Biblical lover Shulamith immolated in the camps:

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

If the black-haired survivor Lili is Julian's surrogate Jewish mother, nourishing his American innocence on the "black milk" of what has befallen the Jews of Europe, she replaces his blonde mother, the assimilationist Marvin's mentally-ill WASP wife, whose tragic fate—full knowledge of which Bea spares Julian—reveals the rot below the gilding of gentile success, just as surely as do the displaced persons roaming a Paris where vapid American tourists hope to relive Hemingway's adventures or find Sartre in a cafe belie the expat dream:

The other foreign contingent—the ghosts—were polyglot. They chattered in dozens of languages. Out of their mouths spilled all the cadences of Europe. Unlike the Americans, they shunned the past, and were free of any taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal. They were Europeans whom Europe had set upon; they wore Europe's tattoo.

The Celan allusion is only one of Ozick's patterns, motifs, and references in this deceptively simple, deceptively high-spirited novel. There are Jewish folktales and magician-mountebanks and Disneyfied folklore, Doctor Faustus and pianos and symphonies (the ironically unmusical Nightingale's ex-husband is an ambitious composer turned Hollywood hack). We go from New York to Paris to California. A mysterious be-wigged Alfred, who killed himself before the novel opens, appears in several characters' recollections: "a yellow wig (no exaggeration!) wobbling on his shiny pate, Alfred knew them all, George Plimpton and Jimmy Baldwin and the rest of them." Devoted readers of Ozick's essays will know him from one of her best, "Alfred Chester's Wig: Images Standing Fast," her generous, poignant tribute her first literary rival and a sensibility enormously different from her own, an avant-gardist opposed to her historical sobriety (if not literary solemnity). There are flowers (Lili and Iris, whom Julian collectively calls "the Botanicals") and more birds (Julian the aspiring poet likewise hails the refugee women, disparaged as pigeons by callous Parisians, as "the doves of the Marais," the latter being the city's old Jewish quarter). There are fine phrases, as when Bea is grading a stack of student essays and thinks of the experience—the honest teacher will understand—as "a starvation of words."

If The Ambassadors is restricted entirely to its protagonist's point of view and written in the late-Jamesian style of maddening circumlocution, Foreign Bodies gives us Ozick at her most Woolfean, her most Forsterian, soaring from chapter to chapter in exclamatory prose among the perspectives of all the major and some of the minor characters, and Ozick at her most Bellovian, immersing us in the world of sensation, making us feel what it is to live on earth, in the body. The novel's polysemous title may refer to the displaced persons of Paris, the Jews of Europe, and Judaism within Christian civilization, but it surely means also the way our bodies are foreign to ourselves, rebellious in their needs and desires to our conscious wishes and moral choices.

Not many great novelists are also equally great essays. When it does happen—Woolf might be the 20th-century paradigm case, at least in the Anglophone world—the novelistic and essayistic visions tend to agree, as, say, when Orlando narrativizes A Room of One's Own or A Room of One's Own codifies Orlando. With Ozick the great essayist—the great moralist!—and the great novelist—the great sensualist!—are at odds, a conflict she herself pictures as Jerusalem vs. Athens with the "after Auschwitz" stakes as high as they could possibly be. The sensually explosive Foreign Bodies certainly worries over the problem. It's a novel of childless marriages—Bea has no children; Lili lost one child and aborts another; Iris resolves never to procreate—perhaps, therefore, of a sterile civilization. What are we to think when Ozick—the stern lawgiver of those early essays that looked so askance on the childless Edith Wharton, on the gay E. M. Forster—grants this to Iris as the girl's final epiphany?

She wished she could wish away her woman's thighs and the underground factory that was her woman's groin. She would never again plummet into the folly of coupling, she would never have a husband. She would live with her father forever. She wished she could be free. She wished she could be Bea.

There is no procreation in the novel, only artistic creation. Bea finally fathers the child of a symphony in the womb of her theretofore creatively stymied ex-husband:

The sound was tremendous, the sound was august, it was a thunder, a chorus of tragical gods, it was out of the deeps, it was out of the sky, it was hail, it was flung stones, it was majesty!

Ozick wouldn't have the bad taste to mean this as a self-appraisal of her own novel, and Foreign Bodies is written in a somewhat more comic key than these superlatives suggest—the word "scherzo" recurs—but as a description of the author in perennial confrontation with herself and with the massive historical forces she embodies, we could do worse.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Start with a recommendation from David Foster Wallace; add in a novel that got a lot to do with one of my five favorite novels (James' Ambassadors)... well, you'd think I'd love it. And yet, I conclude, meh.

First the fun stuff (fun, at least, for people like me): Ozick takes James' 'ficelle,' the character who exists only to let the plot carry on doing what it needs to do, and turns her into the main character. I always fall in love with James' ficelles (usually single/'oldmaid'30ish women who are smarter and kinder than anyone else in his novels), so I was immediately excited by this. Sadly, I am not in love with Bea. Anyway, Ozick then moves the plot of the Ambassadors to the fifties, and instead of Americans, makes it about Jewish Americans. I don't really care, although there are some possibly interesting bits about Jewish American young men falling in love with Jewish European displaced person middle aged women.

Now, the sillinesses: Americans in California are philistine idiots, even if they were once promising artists. Americans in Europe are post-romantic idiots, even if they were once promising scientists. Americans in New York, though, are all tremendously sensible. Even Europeans in New York are tremendously sensible. And this isn't just a 'New Yorkers know better' thing. The characters who stop by in New York become sensible for just as long as they're in New York. Suffice to say, as an Australian who has lived or presently lives in Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, I find this sort of thing pretty irritating. I've never felt more insane and silly than the few days I've spent in New York. The literary disease of making everyone except the utterly, utterly stupid philistines consumers of great literature (including one character who's related to Proust) is in full flow.

Other than these points, it's meticulously, perfectly crafted, and has absolutely no emotional or intellectual interest or weight whatsoever. I imagine that Jewish Americans who live in New York will be very flattered. Otherwise you might want to stick to, say, The Ambassadors.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, it keeps being described as a 'photo-negative of Henry James's The Ambassadors' which ...

I stopped reading it about 1/3 of the way through (despite enjoying it) feeling like perhaps I was missing out on liking it even more by never having read The Ambassadors. Worst mistake ever! At some point I am going to have to admit to myself that I will never, ever enjoy a book by Henry James and that, unlike Sam I Am, this is not due to lack of exposure but the fact that we just don't click. But every few years I try the Green Eggs and Ham again and every few years I am bored to tears and in this case, that boredom nearly tarnished Foreign Bodies in my mind forever.

Which would have been a tragedy because it's a lovely book! It may be that I am missing yet more layers of meaning from my shallow appreciation of the arts, but in and of itself, I enjoyed it. The characters were, while not universally appealing, wonderfully drawn. I liked the story, I liked the developing relationships, the fractured family you're stuck with even though you don't know them, Bea's just awesomeness and snarky letters to her bullying older brother. I love the fact that it's the female cast that carries this book, that drives all of the action (perhaps that's what makes it a photo-negative!)

I only went back to it after the Henry James Incident because it hit the Orange Prize shortlist and I didn't want to read all-but-one and I'm so glad I did. Not my favorite of the short list but really excellent.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Foreign Bodies", Cynthia Ozick's latest novel, is a brilliant twist on Henry James's "The Ambassadors". Set nearly three-quarters of century after James's novel, immediately after World War II, "Foreign Bodies" can be seen as the former's mirror image. However, that would be a most simplistic - if not derivative - means of describing it, especially when Ozick has created one of the most memorable characters I have encountered in recent contemporary fiction; Bea Nightingale. Simultaneously irascible and likeable, Nightingale is a veritable force of nature, whose presence disrupts the lives of those around her. She's sent on an errand by her estranged brother to look after his son, her ne'er-do-well nephew, in postwar Paris. There she meets not only her nephew, but his lover, an Eastern European refugee. How she becomes involved with her nephew and his lover is one I'll keep a secret, but it is a secret well worth uncovering via Ozick's elegant ear for dialogue and sparse, but lyrical, descriptive prose. Hers is definitely among the most remarkable literary achievements I have read within recent years. Without question, Ozick has written a modern American literary classic that pays ample homage to its predecessor in spirit, if not in its literary style and content, and yet it is a classic that demonstrates her own unique, quite captivating, literary voice.

[Laila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, I read the first page and thought to myself "How have I not heard of Cynthia Ozick before? This is going to be the best book I've read in ages, I can just feel it!" Sadly, it did not sustain the initial wave of excitement it caused me. How can someone make Paris seem dull? She does it. The insufferable nephew, eek! If done right, characters can be insufferable and still able to add to the story. This guy was just a limp and listless character. What the hell was his wife doing with him? Why so much mystery about her previous marriage? Did we really believe that Marvin, the brother/father, would so relentlessly berate his sister for things she had no control over, like his children's abominable behavior? I didn't anyway.

As I was reading, I found myself wondering where the author was from. I was guessing NYC since the book had a feel to it that I associate with many other books I've read that were set in New York or written by New York writers, overly cerebral and self-indulgent. Maybe I'm just not smart enough. Anyway, 3 stars because you can tell she is a great writer, I just had a lot of issues with this particular book. One highlight for me was the letters from the niece, she was a bit of a punk but the tone was fresh and real.

[Leigh Hancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like Henry James, you'll probably like this book, although it's slightly jumpier than, say, The Wings of the Dove. Ozick loves delving into her characters' minds and she does so beautifully, just like James, with surprising and real and unexpected results. That's all good. And I do like novels set in Europe shortly after World War II.

But the main problem (for me) was that I didn't like any of these characters: the spinsterish Bea who can't seem to tell her brother and ex-husband to f--off; the strangely bloodless niece Iris; the totally whiny, deluded nephew. There is hope for Lily, the Holocaust survivor, but why in the hell is she with the nephew? And then there's the strange Dr. Montelbano...oh, I could go on and on.

To be honest, I was so irritated with the lot that I quit reading and (a week or so later) skipped to the last page. Which ends on a ho-hum question. I guess this book just isn't for me.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never read the Henry James novel The Ambassadors. That’s probably an important point to make right up front. I’d love to be able to go on and on about how brilliant Cynthia Ozick’s reverse reimagining of the tale is or on the flipside perhaps instead about how much it flat out sucks, but sadly I’m not really qualified to make either of those judgments. What I can do is tell you what I thought of Foreign Bodies as a wholly independent novel. Ready? Here we go.

For the first few pages of this one I thought it was way too pretentious. Oh look how clever Ozick’s trying to be by introducing a spinster named Bea into 1952 New York and having her brother Marvin send her to Paris to track down his wayward son. Will the clumsy aunty get up to hysterical antics when transplanted into the heart of a foreign culture? Will this be a laugh riot a minute? Well, no actually.

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[Ernie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating reading this hitherto unknown to me USA writer. She uses multiple points of view in a third person narration so I sometimes had to check who was there but the characters are lively. Set in New York, LA and Paris in the early 1950's, the disparate characters are linked by a music theme personified by a grand piano that dominates Bea's NY apartment and her divorced husband's music composition. Meanwhile, the younger generation go off to Paris but do not find enlightenment there while back in NY, Bea and her fellow teachers are asked to make the McCarthy inspired loyalty oath. Spotting Sartre at the Deux Magots did not count. In her intriguing interview in The Guardian, Ozick admits a long time fascination with Henry James novels and suggests that this novel is "an inversion of The Ambassadors" which I have now an additional impetus to read.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this because it was supposed to be a shadow of Henry James' The Ambassadors --- updated to the 50s and with gender reversals. Unfortunately, I found all the characters massively irritating --- Bea (in the Lambert Streather role) is sent to Pairs by her incredibly obnoxious brother to rescue Julian who is the brother's son. Bea (like Streather) has her life changed by the journey (oh yawn). Why Bea didn't flip her brother the bird and tell him to do his own dirty work is an example of the novel's uninteresting puzzles. Ozick's attempt to move James into the 20th century wasn't a success. Still points for the concept and for trying.