Dictation

By Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For class acts, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick are a match for any literary backfield Boston, San Francisco, or other cultural capitals might field. In individualised manners, the first three are all realists whose imaginative work is significantly coloured by social or political concerns. Ozick, on the other hand, a keen observer of wounded conscience and blindsided consciousness, is more cerebral than the others as well as less absorbed in the ebb and flow of history.

This is not to say Ozick stands aloof from the passing scene, but her concerns tend to be more instrumental than thematic. A chronicler of human fallibility, her characteristic tone is ironic or derisive. Of the four stories in Dictation, her current collection, two culminate in lacerating laughter and another with the revelation that lying or self-deception is the universal language of mankind. Consequently, although she never tires of acknowledging Henry James as her Master, her work is equally redolent of the mature visions of Twain and Melville.

Of my Bronx quartet, Ozick, craftiest at her craft, is by far the most difficult for many readers to grasp. To that end Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), her most recent novel, may be confidentally exploited as a kind of concordance to this new compilation of not-so-very short stories. In one of them, for example, the surviving Jewish sect of Karaites of Heir to the Glimmering World are reincarnated as sectarian exponents of a utopian, universal language aimed at ameliorating the global discord etiologically symbolised by Babel and its Tower.  Another Heir to the Glimmering World recurring, apposite motif in these new stories are mistreated babies who, symptomatic of an adult world that has lost its bearings, serve not as symbols of hope or redemption but as heirs to victimhood, mayhem, and murder.

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