Inside a lonely mind
David Herman and Julia Neuberger consider American tales of errant parents
BIt is one of the best novels written by anyone in recent years
orn in New York in 1928, Cynthia Ozick was part of that extraordinary generation of JewishAmerican writers that included Grace Paley, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Now, at 93, she has written not only one of her best novels but one of the best novels written by anyone in recent years. It is an astonishing work.
Antiquities tells the story of Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, now in his eighties, looking back over his long life. It is 1949. He is one of seven old trustees living in a long-forgotten boarding school for boys in Westchester, “an institution that saw its last pupil thirty-four years ago.” He attended the school as a child and is now writing a memoir of his schooldays.
The novel moves back and forward in time, from his schooldays father’s trip to Egypt in 1880 to the end of the novel in 1950. But the key moment comes when his father impulsively leaves the family law firm and his young wife to join his cousin, the famous archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, on an archaeological dig near the Nile. He returns with a fascinating collection of ancient objects, which he later passes on to his son. There is talk of a scandal and even madness, but all this is told obliquely, with hints about his parents’ unhappy marriage.
Lloyd, one of the great unreliable narrators, is fascinated by this story. Why did his father leave for Egypt and then return? Was he mad? Was there a sexual element to his scandalous flight? What is the story behind all these mysterious ancient objects and the manuscripts hidden away in an old cigar box?
The novel is about memory, the passunderlying ing of time and attempts to capture the past and come to terms with its mysteries. There is a constant hint of sexual compulsion, perhaps even perversity. And the story is full of things shut away in boxes and drawers.
This is a tale of concealment and repression, what people have to hide from others — and from themselves.
The novel is set in three specific moments: Lloyd’s father’s flight to Egypt, his own desperately unhappy schooldays where he meets the mysterious Ben-Zion Elefantin — “the subject of my memoir” — and then Lloyd’s return to the school as a trustee, where he is just as much of an outsider as he was as a child.
The story unfolds in a series of short chapters, each apparently written by the narrator between 1949-50.
Antiquities is one of the great depictions of loneliness, mourning and masculine unhappiness. An only child, Lloyd was friendless at school, and is friendless now in his old age. His wife is dead, he has only one son, whom he finds exasperating, and his one true love, Peg, is also dead. The old school, covered in dust, is falling apart around him.
And then there is Elefantin, whom he met at school when he was ten. Elefantin, “my unusual attachment”, is a Jew. Petrie could not be more gentile. He finds the boy’s exotic Jewishness both fascinating and repellent. Jews are a kind of provocation to him. He doesn’t like them, with their clubbishness and foreign accents.
This is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the novel, its depiction of antisemitism from the inside, what it feels like to have a visceral dislike for Jews, one fascinating Jewish boy in particular.