"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


From Publishers Weekly
H Novelist and literary critic Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers; Metaphor and Memory; etc.) again proves herself to be a daunting intellectual who writes with both grace and conviction. This collection of 19 previously published essays (in venues like the New Republic and Commentary) highlights the reasons for her status as one of America's leading literary figures. In "Dostoyevsky's Unabomber" she demonstrates her ability to uncover similarities across wide contextual gulfs by likening Theodore Kaczynski, "a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian," to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. In "The Impious Impatience of Job" she calls upon her substantial knowledge of the Bible to rethink an oft-discussed tale. "How I Got Fired from My Summer Job" is a personal memoir about misplacement as a typist in an accounting firm upon completion of graduate school in literature. All in all, Ozick covers an almost unbelievable range of subjectsDfrom lovesickness to cinematic adaptations of Henry James's novels to the merits and beauty of a simple kitchen ladle. She also returns, fiercely, to the HolocaustDboth explicitly in"Who Owns Anne Frank?" and implicitly in"She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body"Dand other themes that she's explored previously. Ozick writes that Frank "was born to be a writer," that her "presence" is "thick rather than thin"; the same could be said of Ozick herselfDshe brings a novelist's fresh, frank eye to matters others might overlook and demonstrates a heightened consciousness of her own methods as a writer and public figure. And though she confesses a resistance to the political, she in fact succeeds in redefining the notion of the political through these fine essays, making it something subtle and deeply transformative. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays, Ozick (Fame and Folly) argues: "If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use." Her elegant essays live up to her own definition. Although she takes up political topics, as when she uses Dostoevsky's writing as a foil for a discussion of terrorism, or when she writes about literature and politics in an essay on The Diary of Anne Frank, politics is not the center of those essays. Ozick takes us on a meandering walk through the halls of literature, moving us to ponder Henry James's selfishness in protecting his space to write his stories and novels or the difficulties in translating Kafka. Her essay on public intellectuals, who, she argues, find a suitable model in E.M. Forster, offers fresh insights into a contentious topic. While many of the essays may be subtly polemical, all of them are deeply personal considerations of literature and life. Warm, funny, and engaging, this collection is highly recommended.DHenry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Ozick is an intellectual warrior and a mighty essayist. In her fourth collection, the fiercest yet, she grasps the texts that claim her attention, turns them upside down, and shakes them for all she's worth until they're emptied of their secrets. Ozick takes seriously her role as a published thinker, a topic she explores with heat in "Public Intellectuals," then, in her most clarion and exciting essays, she wrestles with that age-old quandary: "Is there redemption in suffering?" In a thunder-and-lightening assault on the Book of Job Ozick asks, "Which of us have not doubted God's justice?" then concludes that both God and evil are impenetrable, but that our raison d'etre is to question and protest. From there it's a natural segue into "Who Owns Anne Frank?"--a bracing inquiry into the shameful "conversion of Anne Frank into usable goods," which she perceives as a particularly insidious form of Holocaust denial. More reflective, although just as vigorous, are her considerations of Henry James, Kafka, and poetry, while several gleaming bolts of personal recollections complete this potent and necessary volume. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
Ozick's new collection of essays from such magazines as The New Republic and The American Scholar thoughtfully explores the delicately calibrated and often adversarial tensions that affect the relation between art and politics.In her foreword, the author admits to resisting the political, but suggests that in writing on such highly politicized figures as Anne Frank and the Unabomber, she might have "willfully entered the lists of tenet and exigency." While George Orwell may have been right that the claim that "art had nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude," Ozick nevertheless resists those who chide Jane Austen for not criticizing British Imperial policy. Two notable pieces, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" and "Public Intellectuals," provocatively explore these two opposing positions. The first is a quiet but impassioned objection to the way Anne Frank's life (especially in the dramatized version of her diary) has been transformed into a universal message of hope and forgiveness that ignores the reality of evil. In Ozick's opinion, it might have been better if the diary had never been found. In the second, she chides E.M. Forster for making "art for art's sake" the theme of a speech he delivered at a writer's conference in 1941-as war raged in Europe. Two personal essays, "A Drugstore Eden" and "How I Got Fired From My Summer Job," are, respectively, an affectionate recollection of reading in the hammock behind her father's drugstore, and a wryly humorous account of misunderstandings and differing expectations. In other notable essays she compares Dostoevsky, a former radical, with the Unabomber; notes that the movie of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady is inferior to the novel, and again, referring often to James, explores an artist's need to be selfish.Ozick is perceptive as usual, but these often seem like old war-horses revisiting familiar battlefields. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Her best collection to date."
--The Boston Globe

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phraseÉ. Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phrase... Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times


Review
"Her best collection to date."
--The Boston Globe

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phraseÉ. Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phrase... Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times


Book Description
Quarrel & Quandary showcases 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.



From the Inside Flap
Quarrel & Quandary showcases 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.


From the Back Cover
"Her best collection to date."
--The Boston Globe

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phraseÉ. Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times

"I urge all lovers of American prose to read it... Cynthia Ozick is, for my money, the most accomplished and graceful literary stylist of our time... Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays."
--John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review

"Full of arresting turns of phrase... Even when you disagree with her, she electrifies your mind."
--The New York Times



About the Author
Cynthia Ozick lives in Westchester County, New York.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Forethoughts


"But you are engagé," the famous and energetic man who four years ago directed my play remarked the other day. I say "my play," and not "a play of mine," which may suggest more than one, because it is the only work for the theater I have ever written; I feel certain I will never write another. I had not seen the director since the play closed, and his comment -- that once-faddish, Sartre-sounding word -- startled me. My one play had, in fact, been political, even polemical; it was about Holocaust denial. And though I had always longed to try my hand at drama, I had supposed it would find its shape, if the time ever came, in something literary or satiric, or both; my secret mnemonic model was Simon Gray's frivolously melancholic The Common Pursuit, which had, decades ago, enthralled me. So I was surprised when a congeries of circumstances, not all of my own manufacture, resulted in a play that was indisputably "engagé." I had been driven to it like a wheel the spokes of which were being nailed into place, even while it ran, by mechanics in unfamiliar uniform.

I mean by all this that I resist the political, and am reluctant to take on its spots and stripes: the focus and deliberateness of political engagement, its judgments and its zeal, are so much the opposite of loafing and inviting one's soul. This collection, for instance, includes an essay on essays, wherein the form of the essay is defined, and defended, as follows: "If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use." This was only the latest in a string of similar formulations -- or call them wardings-off; what was being warded off was any tincture of the topical or the tendentious. In 1983, in a foreword to my first non-fiction collection, I wrote, comparing essays to stories, "Sometimes even an essay can invent, burn, guess, try out, hurtle forward, succumb to that flood of sign and nuance that adds up to intuition, disclosure, discovery. The only non-fiction worth writing -- at least for me -- lacks the summarizing gift, is heir to nothing, and sets out with empty pockets from scratch." In a 1988 preface, this time dubbed a "forewarning," I continued along the same line, or tightrope: "Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo. What I am repudiating," I persisted, "is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a Weltanschauung; that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction -- a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet."

Can I make that stick here? Or, rather, can I claim that I have stuck to this credo-contra-credos? Or have I, despite these defensive and sometimes slippery declarations of resistance, fallen, after all, into the distinctly educational, polemical, and sociopolitical? How can I deny that I have willfully entered the lists of tenet and exigency in writing here on Anne Frank; or, contemplating the rights of history, on so-called Holocaust fiction; or on the responsibility of public intellectuals; or on Dostoyevsky's Unabomber; or on Central European politics and policies, ancient and modern, as a framework for Kafka's familial and personal history?

George Orwell, in "Why I Write," asserts that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." There are times when one is tempted to agree with him, and in my discussion of E. M. Forster's views on art in the terrible year of 1941, I do mainly agree -- or, in Forster's own formula ("Two Cheers for Democracy" is one of his celebrated phrases), I am willing to give the idea two cheers at least. Yet inserting politics into literature has, as we have seen, led to the extremist (or absurdist) notion that Jane Austen, for instance, is tainted with colonialism and slave-holding because Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park owns plantations in eighteenth-century Antigua. This kind of thinking fits nicely with James Thurber's tale of the bear who leaned so far backward that he fell on his face. It asks a novel of country-house manners to become a tract on British imperialism. Then must the soldiers and sailors in Jane Austen's fiction supply the occasion for a discourse on the Napoleonic Wars, or may they be left to their romantic employments in the minds of Austen's marriageable young ladies? (It is politics, of course, that accounts for the presence of those soldiers and sailors.) "No book is genuinely free from political bias," Orwell plausibly remarks -- which is different from saying that every book ought to be politically acceptable to contemporary sensibilities. If that were our objective, then scores of European classics, beginning with Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale" -- the theme of which is responsible for centuries of calumny and bloodshed -- would have to be thrown out with the bath water. (Which is what some readers of "Who Owns Anne Frank?" concluded I was seriously recommending for the Diary in the closing paragraph of that essay; these same readers may possibly believe that Dean Swift meant it when he suggested, as a way of ameliorating famine in Ireland, that the Irish babies be eaten.) The writer's subject matter, Orwell goes on, "will be determined by the age he lives in -- at least that is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own." If Orwell is completely right, then both Jane Austen and E. M. Forster in 1941 (he was speaking at a writers' conference) are completely wrong. She declined to engage with colonialism, slavery, and the Napoleonic upheavals; he declined to engage with Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the German upheavals. Both were determined to be undetermined by the politics of the age they lived in. (And yet Forster, in 1924, had already published A Passage to India, arguing against Britain as a colonial power.) If I feel less critical of Austen than of Forster (and I do), it is not only because there is a difference between a novel and a speech, but also because undoubtedly I am, as Orwell insists, determined by my own tumultuous age. Never mind that we are launched now into the twenty-first century; as my essay on the contentions of history and imagination may signify, the twentieth is not yet done with us, nor we with it.


The central question, perhaps, is this: is politics a distraction from art, or is it how we pay attention to the life that gives rise to art? And might not the answer be: both, depending on the issues and the times? A reflection on a ladle in a kitchen drawer can outweigh what the President is up to when what the President is up to is too trivial to bear serious contemplation. The essential point has to do with the idea of the ephemeral. History is and is not ephemeral; situations and events evaporate, but their moral and intellectual residue does not. A century afterward, contemporary incarnations of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards are plainly recognizable. In a post-theological era, a romantic paganism (sometimes labeled "spirituality") freely roams. What Saul Bellow calls "the oceanic proliferating complexity of things" sweeps the mind away from concentration. Concentration on what? On the non-transient. And it is on that negative ground that I set my purpose.

In a recent issue of one of those Internet magazines (I read it in the paper version), a pair of reviewers in e-mail dialogue faulted an esteemed young critic of earned authority for writing about the old moderns -- Chekhov, Flaubert, Mann, Woolf -- as if to say that ripeness isn't all it's cracked up to be. (They were this-generation reviewers, and appeared to regard the critic as a traitor to his cohort.) What was clearly in play was the journalistic conviction -- a kind of noose -- that there is only so much space on a page (even on a cybernetic page), so it had better be filled up with Now: Now being the politics of the current literary marketplace. Generations, yours and mine, are broader and roomier and more flexible than that. Commenting on the beautiful heads of unschooled TV anchormen, Bellow notes, "These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight." Journalism is a necessity, but it is not a permanence. When I hear someone (seventy-plus or twenty-something) utter "my generation," I know I am in the vicinity of a light mind. This is not what Orwell intended when he spoke of being determined by the turbulence of one's own time. When we allude to "our age," either we include our predecessors and their travail (and also their bold genius) or we show ourselves to be minor in brain and intuition.

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, and finding one's way, too, when politics is slumbering, in the surprising atlas of all that is not benign, yet (somehow, sometimes) stirring.

June 1999


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In her new collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick, everywhere acclaimed as a critic, novelist, and storyteller, examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature.

She writes--quarrelsomely--about Crime and Punishment, about William Styron's Sophie's Choice, about the Book of Job. She inquires into the subterranean dispositions and quandaries of Kafka and Henry James. She discusses the difficulties inherent in the translation of great books, whether into film or into another language. She explores what she calls "the selfishness of art" and courts controversy with her views on The Diary of Anne Frank and its transformation for the stage. Her reflections on the "rights of history" and the "rights of imagination" tap a profound concern for truth in regard to the Holocaust. She considers the shifting splendors of New York City, past and present. And she revisits her youth more deeply and with more feeling -- and comedy -- than ever before, in essays that reveal some of the formative experiences of her life as a writer.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Ozick is an essayist who educates and challenges rather than seduces. While she can dazzle with her intellect and language, her essays are more learned than entertaining. I am not always eager to begin an Ozick essay, yet after finishing her new collection, I am astonished by how much I have absorbed—about Dostoevsky and the Unabomber, Job, Kafka, Anne Frank, Henry James, little-known foreign writers like W. G. Sebald, translation, historical fiction and the relationship between art and politics. Ozick is best when discussing other writers. Her essays on James' selfishness and need for privacy and Kafka's attitude toward German culture (and the subsequent translation of his work from German into English) are among the finest I have read on these authors. Her exploration of Anne Frank's story—how it "has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized," its truth continuously subverted—is masterful and bold; Ozick even wonders whether it might not have been better had Frank's diary been burned or lost. Sometimes her perceptions can delight, such as when she imagines archeologists in New York City, circa 3000, uncovering "a row of barbaric-looking poles" that they identify as "Identical sacrificial stands in homage to the city's divinity-king." What they have found, Ozick reports, are "Second Avenue parking meters: the Ozymandias of the late twentieth century." One wishes for more passages like this—clever and playful—yet Ozick bestows ample rewards for the patient and curious reader. —James Schif

Publishers Weekly

H Novelist and literary critic Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers; Metaphor and Memory; etc.) again proves herself to be a daunting intellectual who writes with both grace and conviction. This collection of 19 previously published essays (in venues like the New Republic and Commentary) highlights the reasons for her status as one of America's leading literary figures. In "Dostoyevsky's Unabomber" she demonstrates her ability to uncover similarities across wide contextual gulfs by likening Theodore Kaczynski, "a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian," to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. In "The Impious Impatience of Job" she calls upon her substantial knowledge of the Bible to rethink an oft-discussed tale. "How I Got Fired from My Summer Job" is a personal memoir about misplacement as a typist in an accounting firm upon completion of graduate school in literature. All in all, Ozick covers an almost unbelievable range of subjects--from lovesickness to cinematic adaptations of Henry James's novels to the merits and beauty of a simple kitchen ladle. She also returns, fiercely, to the Holocaust--both explicitly in"Who Owns Anne Frank?" and implicitly in"She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body"--and other themes that she's explored previously. Ozick writes that Frank "was born to be a writer," that her "presence" is "thick rather than thin"; the same could be said of Ozick herself--she brings a novelist's fresh, frank eye to matters others might overlook and demonstrates a heightened consciousness of her own methods as a writer and public figure. And though she confesses a resistance to the political, she in fact succeeds in redefining the notion of the political through these fine essays, making it something subtle and deeply transformative. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

In the introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays, Ozick (Fame and Folly) argues: "If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use." Her elegant essays live up to her own definition. Although she takes up political topics, as when she uses Dostoevsky's writing as a foil for a discussion of terrorism, or when she writes about literature and politics in an essay on The Diary of Anne Frank, politics is not the center of those essays. Ozick takes us on a meandering walk through the halls of literature, moving us to ponder Henry James's selfishness in protecting his space to write his stories and novels or the difficulties in translating Kafka. Her essay on public intellectuals, who, she argues, find a suitable model in E.M. Forster, offers fresh insights into a contentious topic. While many of the essays may be subtly polemical, all of them are deeply personal considerations of literature and life. Warm, funny, and engaging, this collection is highly recommended.--Henry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

John Sutherland - New York Times Book Review

Her pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays . . . The pieces collected here strike many different notes. Some are somber, some light . . . I urge all lovers of American prose to read it.

Stephen Metcalf - New York Observer