Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick

reviewed by Monica Osborne

 With Heir To the Glimmering World, Cynthia Ozick revisits the structure of the Victorian novel, but infuses it with all the complexities of the modern world. All the necessary components of a 19 th century British work of fiction reside in this novel – the orphaned young woman who goes to work for a mysterious employer; a large, old house filled with inexplicable objects and strange characters; a narrative that is plot-heavy and laden with obscure allusions and references; even a token madwoman in the attic. Yet Ozick insightfully inverts the conventional Victorian model to reveal the darker realities of modern existence, filling her opaque narrative with images of distorted characters and carefully placed instances of theoretical analysis.

 For instance, through the character of Elsa Mitwisser, the woman of the house in which the trajectory of this story takes place, Ozick pays homage to the iconic madwoman in the attic. She manipulates the conventional understanding of such a character and instead presents us with the “family madwoman” as a kind of modern day prophet, sitting triumphantly amidst shreds of Sense and Sensibility, which she herself has torn relentlessly until the words and plots are no longer distinguishable – a subtle but inexorable warning to those readers who fail to see beyond the surface of things.

 The undulating lives of Ozick’s characters poignantly reflect a world where everything is in flux. Set in the Bronx of the 1930s, the novel tells the story of Rose Meadows, an orphaned young woman who responds to a mysterious want ad for an “assistant” to Herr Rudolph Mitwisser, a Karaite scholar and the father of a large, enigmatic family of German refugees. Prior to answering the ad, Rosie lives with Bertram, a distant relative who stirs up her first erotic longings. Rosie is compelled to depart when Ninel, his radical socialist girlfriend, forces her out, but not before presenting Rosie with two books: Sense and Sensibility and Hard Times.

 Rosie works many months for Herr Mitwisser without understanding the nature of her responsibilities. Obsessed with his own work, Professor Mitwisser is initially reluctant to allow Rosie to assist him. Moreover, Anneliese, his inscrutable sixteen-year-old daughter, takes great pains to keep Rosie away from her younger siblings. As if by default, Rosie finds herself the caretaker of Elsa Mitwisser, Anneliese’s mother, who was once a prominent physicist in Berlin, but has now begun to deteriorate mentally – singing to herself, speaking in riddles, playing tricks on family members, stealing Rosie’s personal belongings, and engaging in hysteric outbursts of prophetic warnings to her family and to James A’Bair, the family’s inexplicable benefactor who is himself a kind of literal manifestation of a text. The subject for his father’s famous children’s books, James, a literal “exegesis of a boy” is known as the Bear Boy, and spends his entire life – and inherited fortune – attempting to literally and figuratively re-write the narrative of his life. Inevitably, his whirlwind antics ultimately consume him and threaten to permanently destabilize the Mitwisser family. Rosie, then, the only occupant of the house who is not enmeshed in James’ whims, becomes the unwilling and not altogether successful heroine of the story.

 As is typical of Ozick’s better writings, whether fiction or essays, the language is dense, each word significantly nuanced, and each space pregnant with meaning that only careful readers will know how to embrace. Much like her previous novels, Heir To the GlimmeringWorld ardently extols the significance of texts – what is written on the page as well as what is left out, the meaning that resides between the lines and is obscured by the words that are meant to convey it. Texts which are lost, rare, fragmented, or perplexing are of particular importance to the novelist, and much like the work of this story’s Rudolf Mitwisser, whose studies deal “precisely with opposition to the arrogance of received interpretation” that is “often enough simply error,” Ozick’s novel becomes an exploration of and commentary on the creation and interpretation of texts – a creative analysis of our historical understanding of the written word (5).

 Indeed, the very focus of Herr Mitwisser’s studies, the Karaites – a small, ancient sect of Jewish thinkers – and their insistence upon the infallibility of scripture and impossibility of multiple interpretations, provides the novel’s most provocative layer of significance. Mitwisser spends his entire life studying their ways and searching for rare information regarding this now non-existent group of scholars – a people whose very preoccupation with the literal meanings of sacred texts prevents them from seeing the “halo of meaning that glows around the letters” (74). Ironically, Mitwisser, who is doubted by many of his colleagues, becomes so obsessed with piecing together their studies that he inevitably draws Rosie into his narrow world of intellectual inquiry. She is slowly asked to assist him in silence with basic tasks such as typing and recording data, he in the imagined world of his beloved Karaites, and she in the world of refugees and displacement. The intensity of their silent interactions is often more than Rosie can take:

 He did not dismiss me. I ran. I ran to my bed; my tongue was a dry rag in my mouth. He had frightened me, I was in a chill of shock, my fear amazed me with its headlong insistence, it was beyond volition, it took me over, it pinched and shook me. He had opened – to me! – his violation, his rending. They had torn him – like wild beasts, they had torn him. They had thrown him out, he had escaped with his life, with all of their lives; and they had severed him from the Karaites, who were as dear to him as his children. For the sake of the Karaites – to repair the breach – he journeyed every day to the Reading Room, where they lay concealed in tomes kept under lock and key, untouched for generations perhaps, who could tell? When he returned in the evening his fingertips were black with old dust and, no doubt, new inferences (56).

 The increasing ferocity with which Professor Mitwisser engages in his Karaite studies mirrors the mounting force with which Rosie, fueled by the vigor of Mitwisser’s obsession with locating the meaning of the Karaites’ assertions, works to maintain the Mitwisser family structure. It is as part of this task that she discovers in Elsa Mitwisser, her “unsteady teacher of fragmented histories,” both a friend and a voice of prophetic reasoning, and it is only Rosie who, albeit suspiciously, comprehends the words of profound truth that inhabit Elsa’s hysteric ramblings:

 I saw, in the conflagration of her seeing, the critical logic of what hardly deserved the name of madness. Nothing was obscured, reality burned and burned. She knew and she knew. In the shadowed seclusions of our little house on a forgotten street in a nondescript cranny that turned its back on everything urban, hidden in cattails along the lip of a bay where the tide going out, left behind the odors of seaweed and birdlust – here in her nightgown, alert to the subterranean calamities of the world, sat the sibyl. All masks fell; or else all wore masks, in a teeming of reminders and representations: the past was the present, the present was the past, the meaning of one thing was the meaning of another, all meanings were one (164).

 Much like Mitwisser is drawn to the Karaites’ literalist fanaticism, and not unlike Rosie’s eerie awareness of and commitment to the truth hidden within Elsa’s seemingly crazed reflections, as readers we are drawn to the re-structured narrative of this novel that consistently pulls us in and pushes us back out at varying degrees, compelling us to conceptualize the notion of manifold interpretations and the significance of what every text necessarily leaves out. Resplendent in its tragic yet utterly realistic images of the material world, Heir to the Glimmering World’s layers of meaning are carefully nuanced, offering the vigilant reader an experience that is at least satisfying, and at most a euphoric moment of theoretical enlightenment.

 Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004
 ISBN 0-965-14166-7
 310 pp., Hardcover, $24.00