I think the thing I most like about Ozick is that she writes in a way that seems erudite but not in a way that makes me feel stupid. Although I suspect there's more structured meaning and a great deal more nuance in a book like this than I'm equipped to discover, I find that I feel reasonably smart when reading it, which is a nice feeling. She also writes stories that I could never have imagined anybody would have conceived of writing, which is not to say that they're necessarily fantastical (well, Puttermesser was a bit fantastical) but more that they're remarkable in how they tease the extraordinary out of the ordinary. Her prose clicks pretty well with me (I wouldn't often call it beautiful or high on style, but there's an elegance and a precision about it that I admire), though she's maybe overfond in this book of the colon. ( )

A striking short novel smelling of Old-World Europe and Mid-West America. ( )