Pretty standard fare for Ozick but not among my favorites. It's good but didn't knock my socks off. ( )

"Heir to the Glimmering World" tells the story of a young American woman with few roots or prospects becomes involved -- as a babysitter, typist, and confidant -- with a peculiar family of refugee academics fleeing from Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties. There's a wealthy Christopher Robin-type figure, a gender-bending committed Communist, and a wayward pharmacist somewhere in here, too. For a lot of readers, the book will seem a bit twee, a too-cute take on one of the most tumultuous, most anxious, and most miserable periods of the bloody twentieth century. They're not wrong, though the sheer dexterity of Ozick's writing makes it both more readable more convincing than it might have otherwise been. Her style's heavily ornamented and the vocabulary much more obscure than it strictly needs to be, but she's skilled enough to use a five-syllable monster or a back-of-the-thesaurus find without tripping over herself. Her sentences flow beautifully and her prose, though hardly realistic, never comes off as cluttered. Still, charges that "Heir to the Glimmering World" an exercise in surfaces and nostalgic style, that it sounds like it was composed in a too-hip Brooklyn coffee bar, and that it might not exist had the Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" had not been released might not be off the mark, either.

The best defense of the book I can make is that Ozick, intentionally or otherwise, gives us a kind of playful American Gothic here: it features a bucolic, woodsy setting in the middle of the Bronx, communists who burn with love and ambition, a haunted, depressed atomic theorist, and scholar of religious history who's austere as any mystic. It's not a bad analogy for the world in the mid-twentieth century, really: some unsettling contradictions lie just under this book's sometimes too-neat surfaces. The novel's central character is also appealing, and it's no accident that she is probably also it's most clear-eyed and forthright. For long stretches, "Heir to the Glimmering World" can be pretty seductive, and not just because of the way that its author displays her obvious talent. But whether you'll call it a "serious work" or even a good novel is really another question entirely. Probably not for readers over forty-five or so. Otherwise, the mileage on your old-timey Ford Model A may vary. ( )

I wanted to like it but it was forgotten almost as soon as I finished it. ( )

This is a claustrophobic read that, once settled there, rarely leaves the confines of the Mitwisser home. We meet Rose as a young child with her cruel or careless father and see the childhood that she endured. We follow Rose to her cousin Bertram's home and then on to work for the Mitwisser's. It is here that the novel settles in to a state of enclosure, with most of the action taking place in the house that is too small for the Mitwisser family of five children, Rose and later James, the heir to the fortune acquired from the Bear Boy series of children's books. The front cover promised wit but I only found misery in this novel, the life was grey and tough and everyone seemed broken and unattached, there seemed little real joy here. It is a difficult read that I struggled to complete but got there. ( )

There’s a lot to like here. Ozick tells her story of displacement, obsession and failed families, set in 1930s New York, as a grim but still somehow exuberant fairy tale. It never gets cloying, nor is it gratuitously bleak; the language is consistently interesting; the characters engage immediately; their claustrophobic, haunted, “glimmering world” is vivid and has depth. It’s definitely not a story you feel you’ve already heard a million times, full of characters you’ve met before. That’s all to the good. The main shortcoming is that in her refusal to treat the period as more than backdrop, she loses a chance at making a good novel a great one. The upheavals of the 1930s create the key situation of the book, the Mitwisser family’s exile from Europe, but that’s apparently all they are useful for: a distant, fading roar. Her treatment of one key character who is an American Jew and communist is downright caricature—she is a perverse and bizarre force of malevolence; her behavior, including a passing, confused mention of the fight in Spain, is utterly inexplicable, like Iago’s in Shakespeare. It’s useless to take a fiction writer to task for the personalities he or she creates, I know—but in a book where every other character possesses some degree of pathos, no matter how disturbingly they behave, this just reads like a vendetta. But it also seems reflective of the greater problem: a refusal to engage as an artist, as a storyteller, with the larger forces--beyond private obsessions, beyond the family--that make people what they are. You have to go to E. L. Doctorow for that, I guess. Too bad for Ozick, though. She admires George Eliot but doesn’t dare for her mantle. ( )