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the complete review - fiction

Heir to the Glimmering World
(The Bear Boy)

by
Cynthia Ozick

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : an unusual Bildungsroman

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Heir to the Glimmering World is a tour de force of a vision and voice that reflect a compassionate intelligence we are most fortunate to have in our world, which inevitably glimmers when Ozick gets hold of it." - Jessica Treadway, Boston Globe
  
  
• "Dear reader, it works. Heir to the Glimmering World is just as smart as Ozick's earlier books, but it's also funny and witty and engaging on a pure what-will-happen-next level. (...) There are several more layers of story and meaning and literary reference in Heir to the Glimmering World, and a literary theorist such as Ozick herself could probably spend a lifetime tweezing out meaning, but most readers will enjoy it as a satisfying, well-plotted novel -- one of life's old-fashioned pleasures, handily renewed." - Natalie Danford, Chicago Sun-Times
  
  
• "While every strand of this hugely ambitious novel is strange and original, Ozick never quite manages to pull them all together." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Ce roman est un pur joyau, un théâtre d'ombres et de lumière où, de sa lanterne magique, elle éclaire un monde à la fois surnaturel et déchiré. Avec elle, nous avançons sous le signe de la grâce. André Clavel, L'Express" -
  
  
• "Despite its 1930s setting, the novel's outsized characters have the flair of earlier centuries. (...) As in her earlier novels, Ozick is passionately concerned with the importance of texts, particularly obscure or lost texts, fragments and literary enigmas, and the way they irrevocably bend their readers' minds." - Annabel Lyon, The Globe and Mail
  
  
• "The Bear Boy is sparky, mischievous, witty, dazzlingly clever, properly dimensional, and written with such calmness so close to the foulness of history as to seem somehow beyond the world, almost mercilessly self-assured. But like all the best fiction, while it knows that books are a necessary refuge, it doesn't once dodge the heresies and complexities of the real and it works, like all Ozick's fine, uncompromising and paradoxical oeuvre, to leave both books and world at once more properly mysterious and better understood." - Ali Smith, The Guardian
  
  
• "Cynthia Ozick is one of the most consistently inventive novelists at work today, and The Bear Boy is as exciting and diverting as anything she has written." - Paul Bailey, The Independent
  
  
• "Only Ozick would or could have written The Bear Boy. But it showcases her recurring obsessions (...) in an unprecedently elegant, moving and entertaining form. (...) The Bear Boy is not an intellectual high-wire act like The Puttermesser Papers, but it is certainly a novel of ideas." - Theo Tait, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Finally, though Ozick's writing is always polished, and her ear for dialogue exact, no clear sense of theme emerges. (...) Cynthia Ozick is always worth a reader's time and effort, but it appears there is a bit less than meets the eye in her latest effort." - Gordon Weaver, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
  
  
• "Sous les yeux du lecteur, Cynthia Ozick défait avec ardeur tous les remparts qui protègent habituellement contre la folie. Exactement comme si les secousses qui s'apprêtent à faire exploser l'Europe atteignaient d'abord ce morceau de nulle part, suspendu au-dessus du cataclysme. Semblable à un organisme vivant, le texte s'enroule en un tout volcanique, qui sécrète tour à tour un vocabulaire de la coupure (...), puis de l'atomisation (...) et enfin de l'informe." - Raphaëlle Rérolle, Le Monde
  
  
• "Heir to the Glimmering World is a book about absence." - Max Watman, The New Criterion
  
  
• "Heir to the Glimmering World offers itself as an antidote to literature as parasitism, and its arguments are, for the most part, convincing. All the book's strands tug in some way at the knot of sources and interpretations, primariness and secondariness, that constitutes both its substance and its form. (...) The delight of Ozick's intellectual puzzles cannot entirely compensate for the book's faults." - Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
  
  
• "Her characters grab you in the opening pages and hold your attention throughout. (...) An intelligent and delightful writer, she has taken a familiar voice -- that of the plucky orphaned heroine -- and reinvented it in an original way." - Natasha Tripney, New Statesman
  
  
• "Heir to the Glimmering World, delivers an almost Victorian quota of cliffhangers and complexities. Yet she is never, not even for the span of a single page, a meat-and-potatoes storyteller. What matters most are the elaborations, the aperçus, the second thoughts, all of them sublimely scribbled in the margins of her narrative. (...) (A) novel as scintillating as this one makes the world infinitely new, and it's the reader -- every writer's ultimate heir -- who walks away with the biggest fortune of all." - James Marcus, New York Newsday
  
  
• "Even if I entertain certain reservations (her plot strikes me as oddly inert, while her exegesis of the Karaites -- an ancient Jewish sect of scriptural literalists -- would be better off in some other book, preferably not a novel), still I stand and bow before such royal imagery as the following, which describes a man who’s aged since last seen: "His curly hair was dusted all over … as if a peculiar rime had grown over him, or out of him, like a coating of flour." (...) Sentence for sentence, her sense of place crackles with imperial, almost gleeful power." - Daniel Asa Rose, The New York Observer
  
  
• "Even for her main purpose, James doesn't really work. He is intended to stand for an American exceptionalism that once bore intimations of idealism and hope, perhaps, but latterly signifies mainly money and power. His emptiness, though, defeats Ms. Ozick's particular artistry. Hers is one that floats out from the heaviness of the human condition and lightens it, as it did in the Puttermesser novel and does here, with the Mitterwissers and their innocent chronicler, Rose. When it attempts to portray lightness, it forces itself." - Richard Eder, The New York Times
  
  
• "Anything goes when she's making things up. (...) Heir to the Glimmering World is both a chambered nautilus and a haunted house -- a fairy tale with locked rooms, mad songs, secret books and stolen babies. And a children's story, an Oedipal grief, about killing fathers and moving on. And a sendup of Victorian novels that solve their problems with fortuitous marriage, sudden death, miraculous inheritance, emigration to Australia or all of the above." - John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Ozick portrays this ramshackle household to dazzling effect" - The New Yorker
  
  
• "(A) rather turgid affair (.....) Her main tactic, though, is to build situations up by sheer verbal intensity, by rhetoric. The trouble is that with all this pumping-up going on, with nothing to bring things down to earth, it falls to the reader to provide the mental pin for all the distended balloons" - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "Phew. If this sounds like a lot for one novel -- well, it is. Any of these strands could make a novel on its own, and putting them together makes for a soup that's a bit too thick at times. (...) This makes for a rollicking story, but what gets lost is a certain sense of depth. Ozick is an intellectual magpie, and she squeezes so much into this novel that it's hard to tell which of her sparkly treasures should take precedence over the others." - Sarah Coleman, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Ozick’s turning of the tables is brilliant, and it owes as much to close attention as to breadth of vision. Each character is evoked with loving, pitiless detail in robust and gorgeous prose; each one is ridiculous and tragic, noble and petty. However extreme the emotional and moral shifts, the characters remain profoundly human. Besides being full of intellectual riches, The Bear Boy is witty and moving: I hope it achieves the success it deserves." - John de Falbe, The Spectator
  
  
• "It is Cynthia Ozick's achievement that the atmosphere she builds in this claustrophobic environment makes her tale somehow compelling. The intelligence of the writing has much to do with it. Ozick deals in intellectual rather than emotional analysis." - George Walden, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "It is a lively and compelling book, written with conspicuous beauty. It's also rather a puzzle. (...) But though I enjoyed much of the story, and was gripped by it, by the end I found it increasingly contrived and unsatisfying." - Lewis Jones, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Novels about crazy families run the risk of succumbing to mere wackiness, but Ozick maintains a tight grip on her characters, presenting them as genuinely damaged and disturbed rather than lovably eccentric. Indeed, there are similarities here with the work of Muriel Spark, a sort of authorial firmness that occasionally -- and enjoyably -- verges on the ruthless. Ozick’s prose is dense, allusive and idiosyncratic, lit up with extraordinarily precise images of the physical world." - Peter Parker, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Ozick does not seem fully in charge of her turbulent and intractable material, but perhaps that demonstrates her greatness and integrity. Whose narrative can control the shattering events of the 20th century ?" - Michèle Roberts, The Times
  
  
• "It would be wrong to give the impression that The Bear Boy is in any troublesome sense schematic. It is clearly planned and laid out, but it also allows its characters freedom to be perverse and surprising. (...) No passage in this book could be described as sentimental, but Cynthia Ozick has a warmth of concern for her charcters which carries us through their frustrations and despairs by arousing pity and wonder." - Tom Aitken, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "One of the strengths of this new novel is its portrayal of minor characters." - Eve Ottenberg, USA Today
  
  
• "Valéry said that a work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we see. That is a part of what young Rose Meadows comes to know as she emerges from the Mitwissers' life into her own. Living as we all do among unwise folk, nonetheless she also has lived for a time, and lived vividly, in a wise, quietly magical book. As have we readers." - James Sallis, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Heir to the Glimmering World is a Bildungsroman and yet, despite the fact that is largely set in a household nominally headed by two academics and crammed full with esoteric books, there is little book-learning or, for the main character, intellectual pursuit. It is a novel that brings a European family to America -- "this deprived land -- 'dieses Land ohne Bildung' " -- in the 1930s, and thrusts Rose Meadows (who narrates the story) into their midst.
       Rose never had much family, her mother dying when she was an infant, her father -- who was never close to her -- now also dead, and her not-quite cousin Bertram, who had taken her in when she began to study at the Albany Teachers' College, eager to be rid of her as soon as there's a woman in his life. Still a teenager, Rose takes the first position she can find, an ill-defined one in the Mitwisser household that at least promises escape from Albany, as the family plans to settle in New York City.
       The novel is set in the mid-1930s, the Mitwissers early exiles from Germany. They've lost everything, a tenuous future promised only by the position the Quakers arranged for Professor Rudolf Mitwisser at the Hudson Valley Friends College: a specialist in the history of religion, he was to teach on a Christian sect called the Charismites. But even that was based on a misunderstanding: Mitwisser's specialty and passion, his obsession, is with the Karaites, a small Jewish sect who are strict (Hebrew) biblical literalists and do not accept Talmudic interpretation. (The Karaites, who number only several ten thousand, were categorised by the Nazis as non-Jews in 1939, and were thus not subject to the perverse policies that led to the mass murder of so many other groups.)
       A different opportunity arises, a benefactor volunteering to pay for Mitwisser's research and for his family to move closer to New York City, where the professor would have easier access to the materials he needs. It's an opportunity the professor can't pass up: all other ties are cut. Rose, similarly free, is willingly sucked along.
       The Mitwissers' should be an intellectual household. The father is a scholar, the mother, Elsa, was an academic and scientist, a colleague of Erwin Schrödinger (but without getting all due credit -- she's a Lise Meitner-figure). But only one of the children is set to follow them, the eldest daughter, Anneliese. Younger than Rose, she doesn't go to school once in America, but is taught by her father: she is the one person he wants to groom. Everyone seems to have given up on the three rambunctious boys. Their names Anglicised, normalised -- Heinrich becomes Hank, etc. -- they're allowed to be free spirits. Maleable toddler Waltraud remains the family mascot, fitting in with whatever changes come over the household. Yet there is also little integration with this new culture: the household, be it in Albany or then the Bronx, remains an isolated island.
       Mrs. Mitwisser most obviously can not adjust to the new circumstances: nothing of the scholar or scientist remains in the sleepy, clouded being Rose deals with. But it is not just her: scholarship fails here. In upstate New York at least the names of the cities suggested a classical environment, a trace of culture: Troy, Thrace, Carthage, Ithaca, Rome. The Bronx, and even the proximity to the great New York Public Library, are, finally, too far from their world. Mitwisser's research goes nowhere, Anneliese stops studying. (It will end, Rose realises, with Mitwisser's great library boxed up and stored away, books serving no purpose at all -- though by then she will have escaped.)
       For the longest time Rose doesn't even know why she's been hired. As nanny ? Secretary ? Her typing skills come in handy, but she never has a clearly defined job. Once Mitwisser introduces her as his amanuensis, but she is anything but. Far from blossoming intellectually in a scholarly environment, it seems she can only gather actual knowledge by stealth or accident:

She spoke often of Bildung, a term that eluded me. I had discovered Anneliese's German-English dictionary abandoned on a kitchen shelf, among the teacups. Sitting with Mrs. Mitwisser, I sometimes stealthily consulted it. But when I looked up "Bildung," I found only "education". For Mrs. Mitwisser it meant elaborately more. She would say of her grandfather (I learned that he had founded a chain of newspapers at the close of the century), "Er war ein sehr gebildeter Mann," and she said the same of Erwin Schrödinger. Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

     Mrs. Mitwisser understood all this very well; it glimmered with unfamiliar familiarity; none of it was beyond her comprehension. She understood it pleasurably

     This was how, dimly, dimly, and little by little, I derived the nature of the Karaites at my typewriter at night, to the chanting of Mitwisser's esoteric recitations.

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Links:

• Houghton Mifflin publicity page
• Weidenfeld & Nicolson publicity page
• Interview at The Morning News

• beliefnet
• BookPage
• Bookreporter.com
• Boston Globe
• Chicago Sun-Times
• Curled up with a Good Book
• L'Express (French)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• JBooks
• Many a Quaint and Curious Volume
• marginalia
• MostlyFiction.com
• New Statesman
• The New York Observer
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The New Yorker
• The Observer
• ReadySteadyBook.com
• RebeccasReads.com
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Spectator
• St.Louis Post-Dispatch
• Sycamore Review
• Le Temps (1) (French)
• Le Temps (2) (French)
• USA Today
• The Washington Post
• Women's Review of Books

• The Karaite Korner
• Karaites and Karaism: Recent Developments by Mikhail Kizilov

• The complete review's Cynthia Ozick page
• Cynthia Ozick at the Jewish Women's Archive

• Fiction:
  • Antiquities
  • Bloodshed
  • The Cannibal Galaxy
  • Dictation
  • Levitation
  • The Messiah of Stockholm
  • The Pagan Rabbi
  • The Puttermesser Papers
  • The Shawl
  • Trust
  
  
• Non-fiction:
  • Art & Ardor
  • The Din in the Head
  • Fame & Folly
  • Metaphor & Memory
  • Quarrel & Quandary

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Cynthia Ozick has written numerous works of fiction, as well as several collections of essays. She has been awarded a number of prizes and honors, and she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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