Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies

Cynthia Ozick has devoted her career to Henry James. If Trust was her early attempt to fashion a work worthy of comparison with her predecessor, then Foreign Bodies is a bid to reimagine his original.

Foreign Bodies
Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Dh112

Cynthia Ozick has devoted her career to Henry James. Trust, her 1966 debut novel, was heavily influenced by the master's delicate prose style, while Dictation, her 2008 novella, revolved around the friendship between James and Joseph Conrad. She has even admitted that she had "the idea in my twenties that a writer could become the late Henry James."

In particular though, it is The Ambassadors, the most forbidding of James's masterpieces, that continues to haunt Ozick. If Trust was her early attempt to fashion a work worthy of comparison with her predecessor, then Foreign Bodies her sixth novel, is a bid to reimagine his original.

Ozick uses the storyline of The Ambassadors as a framework on which to hang her new cast of characters. Bea Nightingale, a schoolteacher in New York, is dispatched to Europe by Marvin, her overbearing brother, to rescue his son Julian, whose summer of fun in the old continent has been prolonged for so long it threatens to derail his adult life. If this is retreading the past, then these are footsteps worth following.