=Books Recently Read=

Dictation by Cynthia Ozick. This book consists of four narratives, each no longer than 50 pages—too short to be novellas and too long to be short stories—but none longer or shorter than it need to be. Cynthia Ozick is a writer who doesn't write according to formula, not with regard to length or theme or plot or anything else; there isn't one word too many, nor one word too few. She's a true literary artist and this collection is a nice sampling of her talent.

The title story is a fictionalized account of a possible meeting between the secretaries of two legendary writers: Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Miss Bosanquet, who takes dictation from Mr. James, is anxious to meet Miss Hallowes, who takes dictation from Mr. Conrad. She believes they have a great deal in common. They are the mediums through which these great figures of literature pour the bounty of their talent; the genius passes through them first and by their transcription alone onto the page. Why should James and Conrad alone get all the glory? Aren't they, too, deserving of at least a subordinate fraction of immortality for their efforts? Miss Bosanquet has a plan to achieve her goal but first she must seduce the modestly reluctant Miss Hallowes into complicity. She starts by initiating Miss Hallowes into the illicit pleasures of sapphic love.

"Actors" is the story of Matt Sorley, an aging workmanlike thespian who never made it far enough to be reduced to a has-been. Unexpectedly, he's getting his belated big break when a trendy up-and-coming director decides to cast Matt as the star in his new updated stage-production of "Lear." At first, Matt is reluctant to take the role. He's disdainful of the young director. He thinks the play is pure schmaltz and the production over-the-top, harkening back, with post-modern irony, to the unabashed emotionalism of old Yiddish theater. But almost in spite of himself, Matt gets into the role—or maybe the role gets into him. Something clicks. The past comes pouring through Matt: suddenly he is Lear reincarnated as an immigrant New York Jew. He feels it with every fiber of his being. It's the role of a lifetime for which he's been waiting all his life. Until the second act of opening night when the authenticity of his performance is challenged by the unexpected appearance of a living ghost.

Frank Castle is a journalist, a Catholic apologist on radio and in print. In "At Fumicaro" he is off to a retreat in the Italian countryside where a gathering of priests and Catholic intellectuals are attempting to define the Church's role in the modern world. It's a world where religion is struggling to survive, besieged on all sides by politics, science, secularism and the failing of faith, and where, in Italy, Mussolini and fascism are on the rise. On the night of his arrival, Castle finds the chambermaid leaning over the toilet in his room, sick and vomiting. Inexplicably, he is struck as if witnessing a vision from God. He takes the chambermaid to bed. By morning, he's obsessed with her. Within days, he decides he must marry her. The girl is a dolt. She's pregnant with another man's child. She's from the lowest social strata. When he returns with her to New York, he'll be a laughingstock; people will think he's gone mad. Maybe he has. Maybe the girl herself will realize that they don't belong together. Frank can't decide. He's going to let fate decide, or God, or the girl, or whatever hand that shapes the cosmos. All he knows for certain is that this girl is his spiritual destiny, his long dark night of the soul. Rather than being her salvation, as he initially supposed, he comes to understand that one way or another, she will be his.

In the final and, in my opinion, most powerful story in the collection, "What Happened to the Baby," a woman works her way through a family history of lies, deceptions, misunderstandings, illusions and self-delusions that have turned her past into a labyrinthine hall of mirrors. As a child, Phyllis was given to understand that her uncle Simon was an eccentric, idealistic genius devoted to creating a universal language that will surpass Esperanto and promote world peace. Conversely, his wife, her aunt Essie, was a vain, selfish, controlling shrew whose unreasonable jealousy of Simon led to their baby's death. But as Phyllis grows older she discovers that the truth is far more complicated, nuanced, contradictory; in fact, it may be altogether unrecoverable. Phyllis—and through her, Ozick--confronts a disorienting and chilling revelation: that whatever the truth may be, it is lost in the telling, told as it is by those determined to shape it to their own advantage. That we may very well use language less as a tool to build bridges between us than as a weapon to destroy each other, less as a means to communicate  than as a way to deceive. That we already speak a universal tongue and everywhere it's forked.