Foreign Bodies
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Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s literary treasures. For her sixth novel, she set herself a brilliant challenge: to retell the story of Henry James’s The Ambassadors—the work he considered his best—but as a photographic negative, that is the plot is the same, the meaning is reversed. At the core of the story is Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorced schoolteacher whose life has been on hold during the many years since her brief marriage. When her estranged, difficult brother asks her to leave New York for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows, she becomes entangled in the lives of her brother’s family and even, after so long, her ex-husband. Every one of them is irrevocably changed by the events of just a few months in that fateful year.Traveling from New York to Paris to Hollywood, aiding and abetting her nephew and niece while waging a war of letters with her brother, facing her ex-husband and finally shaking off his lingering sneers from decades past, Bea Nightingale is a newly liberated divorcee who inadvertently wreaks havoc on the very people she tries to help. Foreign Bodies may be Cynthia Ozick’s greatest and most virtuosic novel of all, as it transforms Henry James’s prototype into a brilliant, utterly original, new American classic.The Barnes & Noble ReviewSeveral years ago the octogenarian novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick was told by a young interviewer that her fiction didn't engage with contemporary culture. The complaint angered Ozick, and Foreign Bodies seems to be her reply. Although set in 1952, the novel has characters that could easily have stepped out of an up-to-date fiction by Philip Roth: a rich and domineering Jewish father named Marvin Nachtigall, his depressed WASP wife Margaret, their hapless son Julian and dull-witted daughter Iris, Marvin's poor and schlumpy 48-year-old sister Bea, and some minor eccentrics -- a B-movie music composer, a mountebank "doctor," an anti-Semitic philanthropist. From this mostly unlikable crew, Ozick squeezes predictable comedy and -- after introducing a character who could not be contemporary, a young woman who survived the Holocaust -- unanticipated emotional satisfaction.
