When more is less

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James.

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors.

In James’s novel, the middle-aged Lambert Strether is dispatched by a New England matriarch to bring home her son from Paris, where he’s apparently fallen for an older woman. In Ozick’s, the middle-aged Bea Nightingale (née Nachtigall) is dispatched by her overbearing brother Marvin to do the same for his son Julian, whose own older woman she soon finds out about.