Hannah Gold at The Nation:
You know you’re in a Cynthia Ozick short story when the wind is merciless and the leaves have dropped. It may already be snowing. In “Bloodshed,” we are greeted by the “icy scenes” that a gun-toting rationalist sees from a Greyhound bus on his way to a “town of the hasidim” outside New York City, where he is ultimately shamed and disarmed by a local rebbe. In “The Biographer’s Hat,” snowflakes adorn the fur collar of a crooked biographer who mouches off a proofreader and persuades her to falsely insert herself into his subject’s history. “A Mercenary” concludes with the haunting vision of a man lying dead “under the stone-white hanging stars of Poland…. Against the stones and under the snow.”
These stories conjure a world that is cold and forbidding. What was once full of fresh promise is now buried. This isn’t to say that Ozick isn’t capable of depicting a fairer climate every now and then—but it will be in Fascist Italy, and a critic, fast approaching middle age, will be made to look catastrophically foolish on every page, as in “At Fumicaro.”
more here.
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