Cynthia Ozick’s new novel — “Heir to the Glimmering World” — is out.
It is a “novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune” — an “impressive achievement, a very different sort of coming of age novel and exile story” — a “thoroughly intellectual novel . . . enlivened by Ms. Ozick’s sharp, even satirical eye for character.”
The book is set in the 1930s. The narrator is Rose Meadows, orphaned at 18, then turned out by her cousin Bertram, who trades her for his Communist girlfriend Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards), before Rose takes a job as an assistant, with ill-defined duties, to a family of German exiles who’ve lost everything and now are lost in America.
Ozick gives us this remarkable riff by Ninel, who is “angry at all novels” because, like movies, they “failed to diagnose the world as it was;” the “only invention worse . . . was religion:”
She railed against all varieties of worship. “If you want to get the real lowdown on, okay, let’s take Christianity,” she urged, “try this out.
“You’re a believing Christian of the twentieth century and you’re transported by time machine back into ancient Rome. You’re walking around the main squares and it’s all pretty impressive. Big marble cathedrals with columns. Huge statutes all over the place, and folks crowding into the temples, genuflecting and bringing offerings. Plenty of priests and acolytes in fancy dress, the whole society rests on this spectacular stuff.
“And then you ask what’s behind it, what’s it all about. You sit down with a couple of these ancient Romans and they start telling you it’s Jupiter, the god who lives up in the sky and runs the world. And you think, Jupiter? Jupiter? What’s Jupiter? There isn’t any Jupiter, it’s all imagination, it’s all some made-up idea.
“You know damn well that this sacred Jupiter that everyone’s so devoted to, that everyone’s dependent on, that everyone praises and carries on about, and writes epics and treatises and holy books about, and mutters prayers to . . . you know damn well that their Jupiter is air, their Jupiter is a phantom, there isn’t any Jupiter, no Jupiter of any kind, the whole religion’s a sham and a fake and a delusion, no matter how many poets and intellectuals adhere to it, no matter how many thrills and epiphanies people get out of it.
“Then you come back to the twentieth century, and what you’ve seen and understood doesn’t mean a thing, you’re blind as a bat, you figure you’ve got the goods on Jupiter but Jesus is different, Jesus is for real, Jupiter is a vast communal lie but Jesus is a vast transcendent truth . . .”
Bertram listens to this and wants to marry her, but “Ninel doesn’t believe in marriage. She’s against it on principle.” Rose has begun her education in a glimmering world.