Antiquities

December 14, 2020
Ozick (Foreign Bodies) delivers a beguiling novel of a man living in the past. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a retired lawyer estranged from his friends and his only son, has returned to live at the Temple Academy, the boarding school he attended as a child, which has been converted into a makeshift retirement home for its trustees. There, with his beloved Remington typewriter, he labors over his memoirs. His account revolves around two axes: his childhood fascination with the archaeological adventures in Egypt of his distant cousin Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, which Lloyd’s father impulsively joined, and a school-age infatuation with a mysterious classmate, Ben-Zion Elefantin, who claimed to be from Egypt. Ozick is adept at capturing the vicissitudes of fading memory or flashes of lucid insight, and she unspools the story at a brisk pace. While Petrie’s lively venom and wit are sometimes overdone by Ozick’s overwrought efforts to develop his private-school mannerisms (Ben-Zion Elefantin has a “farcical pachyderm name”; Temple retains “Oxonian genuflections”), the novel becomes a fascinating portrait of isolation, memory, and loss as Petrie’s health and the state of Temple become more perilous. While it doesn’t reach the heights of her greatest work, this is impressive nonetheless. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

April 1, 2021

This charming, poignant novel is presented as the memoir in progress of one Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, an elderly trustee and former student at Temple House, a boys' boarding school in Westchester County, NY, later converted into an old-age residence for its surviving trustees. Petrie is writing his memoir in 1949, but its entries dwell on his student days, when he befriended a Jewish boy named Ben-Zion Elefantin. Before Petrie's birth, his father temporarily fled to Egypt, abandoning his wife and law practice to assist a famed cousin on an archaeological dig. Some artifacts from the trip ended up in young Petrie's possession; one artifact, an unusual beaker shaped like a stork, may have come from the same island as Elefantin's mysterious family. Petrie imagines the beaker representing a connection between the two boys. VERDICT Ozick's 30th published work (she is in her 90s) gently evokes the loneliness, helplessness, and regrets of old age. The novel initially seems a wisp of a story, but scattered within are clues that add layers of meaning to Petrie's faded memories, as well as the impact of his own barely acknowledged anti-Semitism on his life's trajectory.--Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2021
Ozick, whose artistry, erudition, and renown as a fiction writer and critic span decades, is a consummate stylist and a virtuoso of subtlety with a Jamesian streak. Her first novel since Foreign Bodies (2010) is a work of delectable wit, astute imagination, and piercing insight. Ozick's fastidious narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, the last heir to a distinguished family law firm, is writing what is meant to be a brief memoir about his student days at the Temple Academy for Boys. It is 1949, and the school, just north of New York City, has been closed for 34 years, transformed into a residence for its trustees, including Petrie. As he infuriates the others by banging away at all hours on a cherished typewriter once owned by his adored secretary, his remembrance extends far beyond its original parameters to mine a deep vein of inquiry into myth, history, identity, and prejudice. Petrie recalls his father's archaeological adventures in Egypt, and his own painfully fraught relationship with an enigmatic fellow student and pariah, Ben-Zion Elfantin, who claimed to have been born in Egypt to nomadic antiquities dealers. As Petrie, himself a living relic, harbors caustic opinions, stubborn pride, and epic loneliness as he tells his many-faceted story, Ozick sagaciously traces anti-Semitism's perpetual, toxic reach across centuries and continents.

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