Rich, vivid turns of phrase bring post-war Paris to life

Foreign Bodies v

CYNTHIA OZICK’S sixth novel takes as its protagonist the recently divorced Bea Nightingale, “one of that ludicrously recognisable breed of middle-aged schoolteachers who save up for a longed-for summer vacation in the more romantic capitals of Europe”. Cajoled into searching for a nephew she barely knows, Bea travels to post-war Paris, a place where the fumes of the death camps still hang thick in the air.

The year is 1952 and Bea is caught between the people play-acting at being expatriates (’little more than literary tourists on a long visit’) and those ‘Europeans whom Europe had set upon’, the displaced polyglots immune to the Parisian “taint of nostalgia or folklore or idyllic renewal”. Her nephew Julian, a “jobless, futureless, clueless” poet writing for “fool magazines”, is very much one of the former, while Lilli, the physically and emotionally scarred Holocaust survivor he has married, is definitely the latter.

An intentional reworking of The Ambassadors by Henry James, Foreign Bodies proves to be a photographic negative of that dark comedy. Ozick, long in thrall to the man known as The Master, has adapted his original plot so that she might consider anew the classic Jamesian dichotomy between Europe and America. That her cast is mostly Jewish gives Foreign Bodies an added potency. Coming from America, Bea is already an outsider in Paris but, as a Jew in post-Shoah Europe, she is doubly estranged.

This, in essence, is the heart of Ozick’s story: can the Jews who have integrated themselves into the ruthless capitalism of America ever truly acknowledge the industrialised extermination of those they left behind in Europe? Embodying the conundrum is Bea’s brother Marvin, an aircraft parts manufacturer and a bully whose “rant and bluster” twists through Foreign Bodies in a series of infuriating letters. Marvin married blue blood, intending his WASP wife “to be his America, his newfound land, the sloughing off of a skin too tight to breathe in”.

However, when judged against the fresh genocide of Europe, Marvin’s obsession with social standing can never be anything more than petty, grotesque selfishness. It is rejected by his son, whose “junior year abroad has now lasted three”, and later by Bea herself. Indeed, Marvin’s corrosive over-compensation infects every aspect of Foreign Bodies, Ozick having done fine work in building the novel around the character without ever granting him the limelight which he craves. She makes him symptomatic of an unspoken rot which has survived the war, something Bea can only glimpse in the no place of her trans-Atlantic back and forth.

Ozick’s rich, vivid turns of phrase sparkle everywhere, especially in the ‘ferocious heat wave’ gripping Paris, ‘hot steam hissing from the wet rings left by wine glasses on the steel tables of outdoor cafés’. A thinking person’s pleasure, the novel is, like Bea’s guidebook, ‘punishingly painstaking, and if you were obedient to its almost sacerdotal cartography, you would come away exalted by pictures and sculptures and historic public squares redolent of ancient beheadings’.