Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 272 pages, $26
At a critical moment of Henry James' "The Ambassadors," Lambert Strether offers his view of the Good Life. In Europe on a mission to uncover the whereabouts of a wayward young American, the son of his future wife, Strether has become preoccupied by the question of which life is most worthy.
"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. If you haven't had that what have you had?"
In her new novel, "Foreign Bodies," an homage to "The Ambassadors," Cynthia Ozick circles hungrily around this having, on what it means to "have life," any life, regardless of its particular shape. At the same time, she explores the shadowy possibilities lurking behind Strether's rhetorical question: In the absence of life, what can one in fact have? What is it like to be alive but not to have had a life?
When we first meet Bea, we learn that she has lived in strict deference to others' - mostly men's, mostly unreasonable - needs. She has changed her name from "Nachtigall" to "Nightingale" so that the street-tough male high school students in her English lit class will be able to pronounce it. She had originally taken the teaching job to support her husband, Leo, an aspiring composer. But after years of torment, of making her feel inferior to his supposed creative genius, of crowding their Upper West Side apartment with his grand piano and his grandiose sense of himself, Leo finally leaves her and moves to Hollywood to compose movie scores. As "Foreign Bodies" begins, Bea, 50ish and divorced, has recently accepted her brother's request to travel to Europe, like James' Strether, in search of a fugitive son, her nephew Julian. We also learn that Julian's father, Bea's brother, Marvin, is a bully whose crass self-righteousness is amply fueled by his wealth and his successful efforts at social climbing. Even as he asks Bea to travel across the world to help him find Julian, he insults her to the core.
Bea departs for Paris. It is 1952. The city is thronged by destitute European war refugees and young Americans looking for meaning in adventure. Julian, a young twentysomething, whose whereabouts are the focus of Bea's mission, falls into the latter category, and desperately so. He has fled stifling America, land of Joseph McCarthy and his own domineering father, to become a man of letters. But what he has in fact become is an out-of-work waiter with dirty sandals and an unconvincing mustache; a morose boy grown plump from eating desserts left over by cafe patrons; another dime-a-dozen Yank who spends his days scribbling fruitlessly in notebooks. Young Julian is supported by his new wife, Lili, an older Romanian refugee, a waif and shell of a woman who witnessed the execution of her first husband and child during the war.
Throughout the saga - which includes subplots involving Bea's niece, Iris, who has joined her brother as an aimless runaway in Paris, and Marvin's wife, Margaret, a blue-blooded heiress committed to a mental hospital - Bea serves as a go-between, spy and, often, through subtle acts of manipulation, an invisible catalyst in the lives around her. By dint of their wealth, youth or creative ambition, everyone in this story has a wide berth of privilege in which to harbor delusion. Only the wily, wronged women, Bea and Lili, are able to see the world with open eyes. Indeed, they have little choice. Their brief conversations with each other, which are boiled down to Lili's halting English, are the only truthful interactions in the story. Each in her own private way emerges as the hero of this novel. Bea's mission to Europe ends up becoming a reclamation project of her own life.
Smelling salts
The problem with "Foreign Bodies": it's dead on arrival - or rather, on Bea's departure to Paris. The story unfolds delicately but is a struggle to read. When the torpor of the settings - from Paris to New York to Los Angeles - become too much to take, the author kindly, skillfully, offers us the smelling salts of a virtuosic sentence or paragraph or phrase. When Bea beholds a Bluthner piano imported from Vienna, the very 19th-century grand with which Mahler composed his Symphony No. 6, she is described as being "too deaf to see" it for the treasure it is. The humor, though too sparse in this story, is nevertheless sharp: "The wedding cake was wheeled in on a cart, like a belated and infirm guest gallantly overdressed in too many fringes and tassels."
The flourishes of prose may be enough to carry us through the story but are not enough to make the story work. There is something vital missing here, and it's vitality itself. Where is the story's beating heart? The characters are either pieces of furniture or they are golems. Where are the humans? The closest approximation of a living person is Bea herself, but even she is some kind of object, a mirror for the failings of others. Her naivete is a moral compass. Bea is a schlemiel character, but regrettably drained of the saving grace of the schlemiel's humor or spirit or charisma. We are told that she has a talent for engaging her streetwise high school charges, that she is able to draw them into the thrill of great literature - alas, her charm does not come through in this story.
As the title suggests, the novel deals with bodies, not quite animate people. The art of this novel is the morbid kind, in which prose is applied like cosmetics to a corpse. It can be done well, yes. Both the process and the result can be affecting. But alive, it is not.
Perhaps this is the danger of a living writer trying to emulate a dead writer. The effort of creating a vital new-old prose poses the risk of leaving us with something that feels simply old. In theory, a project like this can work. Take Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children" (2006 ), which adopts the sensibility and formal style of Edith Wharton's New York stories. Messud, however, shrewdly, ruthlessly in fact, tethers her story to our world. The contemporary setting keeps the author honest, and pricks the reader to moral alertness.
An existentialist-tinged 1950s reimagining of a 1903 story, a period piece upon a period piece, as Ozick has done here, is a narrow point of departure. The conceit of "Foreign Bodies" is that Ozick is riffing on James' vision. Whereas "The Ambassadors" imagines a contrast between civilized Europe and crass America, Ozick explores a 1950s Europe: postapocalyptic, dreary, depleted, far from civilized. The problem is that her America isn't all that different. Ozick is working in various shades of doom; the contrasts aren't illuminating because there aren't many of them. Ghost stories only work if the ghosts interact with living people. But here there are only bodies.
It is possible that the most compelling dimension of "Foreign Bodies" relates to the author herself. Ozick has often discussed her lifelong obsession with Henry James; she has told interviewers that she spent a full seven years of her youth vainly contending with her master. The result, she said, was an unreadable first novel, "Trust." Over 40 years later, in "Foreign Bodies," Ozick has returned to James as a mature and accomplished writer. In other words, on her own terms.
It is hard not to hear some echoes of Ozick's own struggle in Bea's decades-long obsession with her ex-husband, the visionary, an eternally debilitating presence in her life. Like Bea and Leo, Ozick broke it off with James a long time ago and yet, like so many divorcees, the project of reclaiming one's self, one's life, one's creative energies, sometimes takes many years, if it ever happens at all. The danger in such projects is regression: To speak of the ghost is to conjure the ghost. To fall prey to it. But of course that's also the only way to exorcise it. Late in life, Ozick the novelist is still taking risks, as fearless as ever.
Avi Steinberg is the author of "Running the Books," a memoir of his adventures as a prison librarian, published last year by Nan A. Talese and Doubleday.
