This is from Cynthia Ozick's review of a bio of Roth by Blake Bailey, we hope.
BELOW is something I just found. Cynthia is 92.
Let’s get this part out of the way first: Antiquities is, by my count, Cynthia Ozick’s 24th book, and she is publishing it at the age of 92. As an obsessive fan of Ozick’s since I was in ninth grade (and despite nearly 30 years of reading her work, I am weirdly still less than half her age), I approached this book with no small amount of fear. Was it really possible for a novel written in one’s 90s to be as marvelous as all that preceded it? Couldn’t one, at 92, be entitled to a bit of slack if one happened to publish something short of one’s best work?
Well, let’s lay all that aside, because I’m delighted to report that Antiquities is peak Cynthia Ozick. This slim novel (Ozick rarely writes long) is not merely a gem but also a tiny peephole into the purpose of living in a world that outlasts us. I devoured it in one sitting and then thought about it for days, trying to solve its puzzle.
It’s a very tiny peephole, of course—which, short of standing at Sinai, is all we mortals are likely to get. And in Antiquities, that peephole is so tiny that even a thoughtful reader might well toss the book aside, in the what’s-the-point frustration that American culture today demands of us: If someone won’t say something outrageous in 280 characters or less, why read their work at all? But the fact that our culture has trained us to pass over the profoundest of insights in favor of vanity is itself Ozick’s point. Most of us go through life this way, missing even the moments of revelation available to us. In Antiquities, the narrator almost does too.
That narrator is Lloyd Petrie, a blueblood alumnus of the defunct Temple Academy for Boys in Westchester, a once-elite institution that by the novel’s 1949 setting is merely an old-age home for its dwindling Board of Trustees. These trustees are preparing a book of personal memories of Temple (the school is named for its WASPy benefactor, but the idea of remembering the Temple is as fundamental to Antiquities as it is to, well, Judaism—stay tuned), inspiring Petrie to recall a precious encounter with a schoolmate so strange that his existence altered Petrie’s relationship with history itself.
Ozick winds toward this encounter through the roundabout reminiscences of Petrie, a man haunted by a dead father whose claim to fame was an amateur excursion to Egypt in the late 19th century, where he joined the archaeological excavations of his cousin, the British Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie, and returned with small relics of questionable authenticity. Here the alert reader (or the reader using Wikipedia) begins the archaeologist’s work, sifting through the detritus of Petrie’s memories to corroborate clues outside the novel’s text: Sir Flinders Petrie was, in fact, a real Egyptologist whose signature discovery, unmentioned in this novel, was the Merneptah Stele, a 13th-century-BCE inscription that famously features the earliest Egyptian reference to the Israelites. This, along with Temple Academy’s name, is one of many clues to the hidden history Ozick and Petrie are actually excavating.
As Petrie tells us in his deliberately arch style, “Most unfortunate was the too common suspicion that ‘Temple’ signified something unpleasantly synagogical, so that on many a Sunday morning the chapel’s windows…were discovered to have been smashed overnight. The youngest forms were regularly enlisted to sweep up the shards and stones.” Petrie’s unexamined anti-Semitism here is structural to the plot as well as to the world we live in; we readers are enlisted to sweep up such shards and stones from Petrie’s narrative, the necessary archaeological sifting work for the gradual revelation of what this vast edifice of elitism conceals.
...
Just walked around the block. 75 year old Ruth Deming. Freezing outside. A HOUSE WAS FOR SALE.
Sleighride Road.
I SO WANT TO SEE THE HOUSE.
Lemme publish this now.
Lemme find my Yellow House.
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