Subscription Notification
Please update your billing information
Your subscription will end shortly

Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick

Set in post-war Paris, with nods to Henry James, this is a touching story of secrecy and simmering tension in one American family

Cynthia Ozick’s eighth novel is billed as a post-war re-imagining of Henry James’s The Ambassadors, though its 48-year-old heroine, Beatrice Nightingale, is more like a character out of Edith Wharton, the sort of seemingly negligible woman whose pent-up frustrations can detonate like a hidden bomb. A quarter century after being ditched by her husband, a composer who was so eager to bolt that he left behind his Steinway, she feels “ageing, ragged, and low”. Bea’s fuse is lit, however, when her estranged brother Marvin, a California tycoon, asks her to go to Paris to fetch his son Julian, who shows no sign of coming home after three years abroad.

The New York schoolteacher’s trip proves unsuccessful, so the imperious Marvin sends his treasured daughter Iris