December 14, 2020
Ozick (Foreign Bodies) delivers a beguiling novel of a man living in the past. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a retired lawyer estranged from his friends and his only son, has returned to live at the Temple Academy, the boarding school he attended as a child, which has been converted into a makeshift retirement home for its trustees. There, with his beloved Remington typewriter, he labors over his memoirs. His account revolves around two axes: his childhood fascination with the archaeological adventures in Egypt of his distant cousin Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, which Lloyd’s father impulsively joined, and a school-age infatuation with a mysterious classmate, Ben-Zion Elefantin, who claimed to be from Egypt. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight, and she unspools the story at a brisk pace. While Petrie’s lively venom and wit are sometimes overdone by Ozick’s overwrought efforts to develop his private-school mannerisms (Ben-Zion Elefantin has a “farcical pachyderm name”; Temple retains “Oxonian genuflections”), the novel becomes a fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss as Petrie’s health and the state of Temple become more perilous. While it doesn’t reach the heights of her greatest work, this is impressive nonetheless. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.
April 1, 2021
This charming, poignant novel is presented as the memoir in progress of one Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, an elderly trustee and former student at Temple House, a boys' boarding school in Westchester County, NY, later converted into an old-age residence for its surviving trustees. Petrie is writing his memoir in 1949, but its entries dwell on his student days, when he befriended a Jewish boy named Ben-Zion Elefantin. Before Petrie's birth, his father temporarily fled to Egypt, abandoning his wife and law practice to assist a famed cousin on an archaeological dig. Some artifacts from the trip ended up in young Petrie's possession; one artifact, an unusual beaker shaped like a stork, may have come from the same island as Elefantin's mysterious family. Petrie imagines the beaker representing a connection between the two boys. VERDICT Ozick's 30th published work (she is in her 90s) gently evokes the loneliness, helplessness, and regrets of old age. The novel initially seems a wisp of a story, but scattered within are clues that add layers of meaning to Petrie's faded memories, as well as the impact of his own barely acknowledged anti-Semitism on his life's trajectory.--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
An aging trustee of a patrician boys' school looks back on his years there. This slim new novel from Ozick, a nonagenarian giant of Jewish American writing, is presented as the school-days memoirs of Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a trustee of Temple Academy for Boys. His entry is purportedly only one part of a project he has undertaken along with the school's other trustees (all of whom, including him, are WASPs). As he reflects on what the school meant to him, the journal entry-style vignettes are interrupted more and more frequently due to his ailments and other aspects of aging--which is perhaps Ozick's real theme here. Throughout the novella, memory is embodied in objects: From the special family heirlooms that his father acquired on expeditions in Egypt (a scarab ring; a curious bejeweled storklike sculpture) to more seemingly banal objects (the Remington typewriter with which Petrie records the story; the pages themselves), Ozick shows how objects can powerfully represent the past and how our perspective on that past can be colored by the passing of time. But the object that holds most interest in Petrie's remembrances is another boy at school--the formidably named Ben-Zion Elefantin, whose murky past and heritage interest and frighten Petrie. Their unlikely friendship, and its homoerotic undertones, consumes much of Petrie's musings. Central to these musings is Elefantin's unfamiliar Jewish heritage and ties to Egypt, which faced much scrutiny at (the pointedly named) Temple Academy. Petrie vacillates between awareness of (if not regret about) the prejudice Jewish students faced and unthinking perpetuation of garden-variety WASP antisemitism ("In my own Academy years I saw for myself how inbred is that notorious Israelite clannishness"). The antiquities of the book's title, then, are not only the objects--which Petrie excitedly shows to Elefantin--but the views, emotions, and experiences Petrie and his schoolmates once held, and perhaps still hold, changed as they have been over the years. What we have here is more a character study than a developed story, but Ozick's talent shines through nonetheless; the prose itself is virtuosic. An intelligent and vivid consideration of the embodiedness of memory, if not a particularly engrossing story.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)
Starred review from March 15, 2021
Ozick, whose artistry, erudition, and renown as a fiction writer and critic span decades, is a consummate stylist and a virtuoso of subtlety with a Jamesian streak. Her first novel since Foreign Bodies (2010) is a work of delectable wit, astute imagination, and piercing insight. Ozick's fastidious narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, the last heir to a distinguished family law firm, is writing what is meant to be a brief memoir about his student days at the Temple Academy for Boys. It is 1949, and the school, just north of New York City, has been closed for 34 years, transformed into a residence for its trustees, including Petrie. As he infuriates the others by banging away at all hours on a cherished typewriter once owned by his adored secretary, his remembrance extends far beyond its original parameters to mine a deep vein of inquiry into myth, history, identity, and prejudice. Petrie recalls his father's archaeological adventures in Egypt, and his own painfully fraught relationship with an enigmatic fellow student and pariah, Ben-Zion Elfantin, who claimed to have been born in Egypt to nomadic antiquities dealers. As Petrie, himself a living relic, harbors caustic opinions, stubborn pride, and epic loneliness as he tells his many-faceted story, Ozick sagaciously traces anti-Semitism's perpetual, toxic reach across centuries and continents.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.