Quarrel & Quandary: Essays High seriousness at its best – Shalom Freedman – Jerusalem,Israel
Ozick is an earnest and profound writer. She shares that quality her mentor Henry James so valued,the quality of ‘ high seriousness’. Her essays not only reveal a discerning literary intelligence but a wise moral voice. In her essays here she like the metaphysical poets yanks together subjects from seemingly diverse worlds and makes meaning of the connection between them. The crimes of modern radical terrorists are connected to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov’s going outside and beyond the moral law- the commercial exploitation of the memory of Anne Frank connected with the general failing to properly comprehend the true meaning of the Holocaust-
Ozick is a writer who loves writers and writes about them especially well.
This is one of those books which the reader will afterwards feel a wiser person for having read.
I admit it; I am not a reader of essays. Normally I shun them as much as I would recoil from an invite to go see a big screen remake of “Charlie’s Angels.” The thought of either would make me shudder. As to the former, perhaps I had my fill of Kant in college, or maybe reading “Gorgias” finally put me over some particular intellectual edge that I’ve yet to recover from twenty years later. Whatever the cause, I’ve spent very little time with pedantic or polemical prose since. So what it was that made me pick up “Quarrel and Quandary” is still beyond my ken, especially because I have never read any of Ozick’s fiction. That said, it’s satisfying to report that there is some life left in the old essay form yet, at least as practiced by Ms. Ozick. The Three Screens, as she calls them–TV, cinema, and computer–have not completely made moot the challenge of good writing or intricate analysis, and these Ozick patently demonstrates. You may not turn these pages at accelerated rates, hanging on every word, but you may just as easily marvel at her gifted turn of phrase, not to mention nuance of thought, as you would any plot by the latest faddish producer of pot-boilers. One thing you’ll have to admit when you read this collection is that Ms. Ozick has an active mind on her shoulders, and she has the specific skill of being able to plausibly place on the page the arguments she has constructed in her head. You’ll also notice that she has the uncanny ability to link diverse subjects. In a universe that is haystack filled with competing straws of information, she has a certain facility for finding one straw and sensing its relationship with another where the intimacy is by no means self-evident. It should come as no shock that her work herein just received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. So, kudos to Ms. Ozick, who entertained me in unexpected ways–and who should do the same for you. : Quarrel & Quandaryshowcases the manifold talents of one of our leading and award-winning critics and essayists.
In nineteen opulent essays, Cynthia Ozick probes Dostoevsky for insights into the Unabomber, questions the role of the public intellectual, and dares to wonder what poetry is. She roams effortlessly from Kafka to James, Styron to Stein, and, in the book’s most famous essay, dissects the gaudy commercialism that has reduced Anne Frank to “usable goods.” Courageous, audacious, and sublime, these essays have the courage of conviction, the probing of genius, and the durable audacity to matter.
“True essayists,” declares Cynthia Ozick, “rarely write novels.” This pronouncement would seem to overlook a horde of ambidextrous types, from John Updike to Gore Vidal to Charles Baxter to Joyce Carol Oates–and, of course, Ozick herself. The author of three novels, she is also among our finest essayists, combining a Jamesian nose for moral nuance with some of the most playful and pugnacious prose in contemporary letters. And her fourth collection, Quarrel & Quandary, contains some of her very best work. There are ardent considerations of particular authors, including W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, and Swedish modern Goran Tunstrom. But this time around, the author is even more intent on exploring the rhetorical minefield where art and politics overlap. Her introduction, in fact, is one long riff on the importance of being earnestly engagé, at the end of which Ozick manages to have her cake and eat it too: “Two cheers, then–when there is no choice–for being engagé; but three cheers and more for that other bravery, the literary essay, and for memory’s mooning and maundering, and for losing one’s way in the bliss of American prose….”
In three provocative pieces (”The Rights of History and the Rights of the Imagination,” “The Posthumous Sublime,” and “Who Owns Anne Frank?”), Ozick suggests that the Holocaust is almost–but not quite–impervious to literature. She’s particularly angered by the morphing of Frank’s diary into a mother lode of Broadway-style uplift, a transformation that “tampers with history, with reality, with deadly truth.” Elsewhere, though, Ozick is less polemical, more willing to be dazzled by Roethke’s radiance or Henry James’s epistemological high beams. And it’s not only specific artists but entire genres that win her awed and eloquent approval:
When we say that poetry is strange, we mean not that it is less than intelligible, but exactly the opposite: poetry is intelligibility heightened, strengthened, distilled to the point of astounding us; and also made manifold. Metaphor is intelligibility’s great imperative, its engine of radical amazement.
At its best, Ozick’s prose is equally, radically amazing. She may not always compel our agreement–the scolding she administers to W.G. Sebald, whom she clearly admires, is something of a puzzler–but her voice never ceases to register distinction and detail, emitting what she calls “the hum of perpetual noticing.” Five cheers, then, for Quarrel & Quandary. And by the way, might Mooning & Maundering be a candidate for the author’s next alliterative title? –James Marcus
Quarrel & Quandary: Essays
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Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies) : This collection of critical essays is the first work to examine the short stories of Ann Petry, a noted African American writer. While best known for her best-selling debut novel, “The Street,” the focus of this text is her equally important, but less familiar, volume of short stories “Miss Muriel and Other Stories.” Within Ann Petry’s “Short Fiction: Critical Essays,” contributors from a variety of disciplines, from literary studies to philosophy, analyze and comment on stories such as “Mother Africa,” “In Darkness and Confusion,” and “The Witness.” Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies)
