Child Observation Examples

A life in writing: Cynthia Ozick

"What does it mean?" she says, at her dining-room table in a small town outside New York City. It is a hot day and the room is cool and dim. It means "he's always looked over his shoulder at other people, beginning when he went to Princeton. He's always looking for another self, a better self, than his own self-disparaged self."

The disparaged self is a great theme of Ozick's, the construction of an identity after immigration, trauma, movement from one class to another. She is also familiar with it in the personal sense. She refers to herself in the interview as "unknown, totally obscure". There's a trembling quality to Ozick, a misleading fragility that acts as the surface tension to her great depths. She wrote the new novel partly as a challenge from David Miller, her agent, who noted that she had never written about music before and so as well as Marvin she created Leo, a composer. His passion, which she delineates brilliantly, is, one assumes, that of the writer in musician's form. "Yes, it's a snow job," she says. "Bullshit. It's just a transposition of one kind of passion to another."

Ozick is 83. She recalls growing up in the Bronx in an era when – she smiles to acknowledge how impossible this sounds – it was semi-rural. When she describes her upbringing, it is with unabashed writerliness, sentences that unfold and keep unfolding until she emerges, blinking, at the other end.

Her parents were immigrants from Russia – her mother came as a child, her father at 21 to escape the tsarist conscription. They ran a pharmacy together, addressed each other in public as Mr and Mrs O, and brought up their two children in what Ozick now sees as the tail end of the 19th century. "Certainly there were plenty of cars, but the milkman came with horse and truck, in the Bronx, and in the summer the horses turds would be on the sidewalk and the sun was very hot and the streets were made of tar and these straw turds would sink into the tar and they had this fragrance of barn and country and it was not an unpleasant olfactory experience." She draws breath and laughs.

So serious a novelist is Ozick, in subject matter and theme, it is often overlooked how funny she is and how playful is her writing. (I'm thinking of Ninel, the joyless fanatic in her 2004 novel Heir who is always leading "yet another march in favour of the downtrodden" and who renamed herself thus because it is Lenin, spelt backwards). Ozick used, she says, to be horrifically highbrow, a real bore who thought the only way to achieve Literature was to relinquish all other writing pleasures. After graduating with a masters from Ohio State, she spent seven years labouring on a novel she now wishes she'd abandoned sooner. (She thought she was being faithful to the idea of Henry James, her hero; now she thinks she was idiotic.) "I regret it. If I've ever regretted anything it was putting all my eggs in one basket, holing up and kneeling at the altar of literature, instead of going out and at least reviewing, running around and trying to write for magazines. That would've been the intelligent thing to do but I didn't and that was because of fanaticism.