In the footsteps of the master

FICTION: Foreign Bodies, By Cynthia Ozick, Atlantic, 255pp. £16.99

BEA IS DISPATCHED to Paris by her appalling brother, Marvin, on an urgent mission. She must fetch Marvin’s hopeless son, Julian, the nephew she barely knows, and accompany him back to the US. Although Marvin is desperate and his wife, Margaret, appears to have gone insane, he is not particularly vulnerable or grateful and instead treats Bea as if she were a slave. This is US domestic realism with a difference. Cynthia Ozick has long been hailed as one of the United States’ finest essayists, and she may, indeed, currently be the best. She is an insightful critic and a writer of stylish, intelligent and witty fiction. She makes effective use of her Jewish heritage, with its irony and comic timing, and is committed to the history of her race. There is yet another element that not only shapes her fiction but enhances and informs it: her lifelong devotion to the American master, Henry James.

Ozick wrote her doctorate on James, and her wonderful essay What Henry James Knew(1973) is essential reading on him. Foreign Bodies, her entertaining new novel, her sixth, proves a lively variation on his personal favourite of his novels, The Ambassadors, and she quotes from it for her epigraph.

The echoes and nods resound throughout. Bea, not quite the only heroine – more of that anon – is a high-school English teacher in New York, where the novel is set. It is 1952, and the shadow of the second World War and the Holocaust linger. Bea is 48 and lives alone, her marriage to Leo Coppersmith, a composer, having ended childless years earlier. So, without labouring the point, it is clear that she must have been born in 1903, the year in which The Ambassadorswas published. Bea appears to be following in the footsteps of Lambert Strether, who had been sent off by a bossy widow, Mrs Newsome, to escort her wayward son, Chad, home to her. The young man is believed to have become involved with a dangerous woman. Strether, in common with Bea, is someone who watches others, and both had had their missed chances. It is Strether who advises the artist expatriate Little Bilham to live. "Live all you can, it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life."

When Bea arrives in Paris, Ozick brilliantly sets not only the scene but also the tone of a Jamesian narrative, which has a message yet rarely takes itself too seriously. “In the early fifties of the last century, a ferocious heat wave assaulted Europe. It choked its way north from Sicily . . . but it burned most savagely over the city of Paris. Hot steam hissed from the wet rings left by wine glasses on the steel tables of outdoor cafes . . . At the time there were foreigners all over Paris, suffering together with the native population.”

The familiar James theme of young American in Paris has been deftly taken up by Ozick. She singles out the young Americans “who called themselves ‘expatriates’ though they were little more than literary tourists on a long visit, besotted with legends of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. They gathered in the cafes to gossip and slander and savour the old tales of the lost generations . . . They spoke only American. Their French was bad.”

But Ozick is equally aware of another group in Paris, people who speak far more than merely good French. “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.”

Alongside bickering US families, Ozick looks at the refugees; the victims and the survivors, the Jews who staggered into Paris like ghosts and slowly resumed their human form. Julian may have been initially presented as a selfish young dreamer, and, in common with Chad in the James novel, he is involved with an older woman, but in Lili, a Romanian who has lost her husband and child, he has found a real-life hero. Julian’s sister, Iris, a bright college girl, who also sets off to Paris on his trail, slowly realises “that her brother had changed”. Although she has her own agenda, she is astute enough to note that her brother has married “a woman who was teaching him the knowledge of death”.

It would be easy, but such a pity, to miss out on the deceptive weight of this novel. Ozick has created several three-dimensional characters. Bea is likeable and about to finally wreak civilised revenge on the selfish Leo. He and Marvin learn that a bully doesn’t always win, while Lili is a revelation and the sympathetic heart of an impressively unsentimental novel. There are phrases here and there that falter into fussy literary description, but for most of the book Ozick’s prose is clean and sharp. Several of the funniest exchanges are reserved for letters that fly back and forth between the characters. Bea and Marvin don’t like each other, and their missives are convincingly shaped; Marvin rants, but Bea plays within the bounds of relative politeness. Ozick knows her characters and is true to their voices. Elsewhere is the correspondence embarked on by the highly clever, highly impulsive Iris, on whom her nasty father’s hopes must rest. It is again Iris who realises that she doesn’t know her aunt Bea, but that she has tried to make a fool of her. Iris sees in Bea the opposite of her tragic mother. Bea lost her marriage but not herself, and ultimately Iris salutes a different kind of courage, which she hopes to emulate.

For all the literary resonances, Ozick’s novel stands independent. She is a good writer possibly because, in addition to her obvious gifts as a storyteller, she is an extremely shrewd reader and an instinctive observer, well able to balance her subplots and minor players. It is about New York and California, as well as New York and Paris. There is an inspired passage in which Bea considers her carpet after she has finally managed to have Leo’s dreaded grand piano moved.

Henry James may preside over this homage novel, and it is exciting to read Foreign Bodiesagainst the backdrop of The Ambassadors. The word play is dazzling but relaxed, never forced, while Ozick the critic never loses sight of characterisation and dialogue. It is a tribute to her skill and subtle artistry that, yes, her hero is present but so too is another great, if very different, US writer, William Gaddis. That is no easy feat, but Ozick carries it off with humour and not a little panache.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times