(6 of 6)
Trust (New American Library) by Cynthia Ozick, 38, a housewife in New York's suburban Westchester County, is the most ambitious of the new first novels, a boardinghouse stab at greatness that should at least bring back some fame on the fork. Author Ozick is an intense mouse (5 ft. 2 in.) who has brought forth, after 6½ years of gestation, an elephant of a book (568 pages) that reconstructs a central experience of American Jewry in the troubled '30s: the religion of social justice that accepted Marx as its messiah. The radicals in this book are mostly of the wealthier sort, and their proletarian opulence permits innumerable ironies of contrast between the things they believe and the things they do. The author's sense of structure and her grasp of character are at best almost Tolstoyan. Her dialogue is a persistent delight, and her prose at intervals attains a Jamesian sonority. A random sentence: "My father's letters, infrequent as they were, always brought their own oppressive season into our house, suggestive of a too-suddenly fruitful thicket, lush, damp, growing too fast, dappled with a tremolo of a million licking hairs—deep, sick, tropical." More assuredly than any other first novelist published this summer, she imparts an impression of power and control, and of larger worlds still waiting to be born.
One novel does not make a novelist, and an armful of good ones do not make a literature. Yet the appearance of so many gifted novelists in a single summer may at least encourage those lugubrious critics who perennially rewrite the obituary of the novel to go scare up free lunch at some other wake.