Heir To The Glimmering World (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel "Heir to the Glimmering World" is known as "The Bear Boy" in the United Kingdom. It is fitting that this complex difficult novel will take two, or perhaps more, appropriate titles. "The Bear Boy" refers to one of the many principal characters in the book, James A'Bair. As a child, James had been the subject of a successful series of children's book written by his father. James inherits a fortune when his father dies. We wanders aimlessly over the world before ultimately becoming the benefactor of the Mitwisser family at the heart of the novel. The title "Heir to the Glimmering World" is both more poetic and more difficult to explain. The heir is the young woman narrator, Rose Meadows, 19, of the story. The "glimmering world" could be one of several lost worlds described in the story: the world of the Karaites, discussed below, or the world of Germany and scholarship before WW II.The story is set primarily in depression-era New York in 1933 -- 1935. The book is told with great allusiveness in form and content to British novels, including "Sense and Sensibility", "Middlemarch", "Jane Eyre" and "Hard Times." The early stages of Ozick's novel take place in Albany and upstate New York while the larger portion of the book is set in a relatively remote section of the Bronx. The novel tells loosely interrelated stories of refuges, outcasts, and rebels.The narrator, Rose, is a quiet, bookish girl whose mother died when she was 3 and whose father, a teacher and a gambler, dies when Rose is 18 after he has put the girl in the care of a distant relation, Bertram, 36. Bertram is divorced, a pharmacist, and involved with radical politics. He is in love with an even more radical woman, named Ninel, who is not committed to him. Ninel essentially forces Rose out of her home with Bertram, and at age 18 Rose drops out of a teacher's college which bores her to answer a strange ad placed by a Professor Mitwisser. Mitwisser is a student of religious history who has been forced to flee Germany. His wife, Elsa was a research physicist and the colleague of Erwin Schrodinger. The couple have five children. Elsa is despondent and appears mad. Their eldest daughter, Anneliese, runs much of the household. In Albany, Mitwisser has been teaching at a small college by the kndness of the Quakers. He is a renowned scholar of the heretical Jewish sect known as the Karaites. The governor's of the school mistake him as a student of Christian Charismatics. There is little interest in Mitwisser's passion for the Karaites in the United States. The family moves to New York City to allow Mitwisser to study and write. They are supported by the mysterious James, "The Bear Boy."The Mitwissers have difficulty, to say the least, with their new home in America. In Germany the family was wealthy and respected for intellect and knowledge while in the United States they are spurned. There is a sense of high culture -- or "bildung" in German which the family, especially Elsa finds lacking in the United States. Professor Mitwisser wants his children and family to adopt and adjust, to learn and use English, and to drop German and German culture. The narrator Rose, too, is a refuge and an outcast of a different sort as is the wealthy, dissolute, wandering James who has somehow adopted the Mitwisser family and is their apparent benefactor.Rose has an ambiguous role in the family as a companion to Elsa, a nanny to the children, and a scribe or "amanuensis" for Mitwisser. Although the Mitwisser family is not religious, Mitwisser is the greatest scholar of the Karaites. The Karaites are a Jewish sect originating in the early Middle Ages. The Karaites broke away from mainline traditional Judaism because they refused to accept the authority of the Jewish Oral Law --, the Mishnah and the Gemmorah which comprise the Talmud. Instead, the Karaites accepted the authority only of the 24 books of the Old Testament. Traditional Judaism rejected the Karaites as heretics and the sect became marginalized and obscure. Many of the leaders of the sect wrote voluminously and provocatively. Mitwisser, in this novel, is their scholar. As Rose comes to describe the Karaites as she learns about them from Mitwisser:"They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect." (p.73)Professor Mitwisser loves the Karaites for their independence, their heresy, their obscurity, and their religious passion and feeling. His love, alas, is at the expense of much else in life, including his wife and children. Professor Mitwisser is pursuing threads regarding an earlier leader of the sect who, Mitwisser believes, travelled to India where he studied and became enamored of the Bhagavad-Gita. Ultimately Mitsisser's research program is dashed. Rose and Ozick in particular take a much more distanced position from the Karaites than does Mitwisser.Elsa has a madness that derives from the wife in Jane Eyre. But she also sees certain things clearly. A physicist, she was also the lover of Schroedinger. She undergoes significant changes during the course of the book.The book has the feel of a difficult coming of age story as Rose, who narrates the story from a distance, ultimately uses what she has learned from living with the Mitwissers to begin her own independent life.Ozick has written a cerebral, thoughtful story of refugees, outcasts, and the life of the mind and its limitations. There is a skeptical tone towards political messianism and radicalism, in the person of Ninel and in Bertram's early life, and towards religious freethought and heresy, as exemplified by the Karaites. The author also turns a skeptical eye towards what she sees as the thoughtless, materialist character of American life. Some of the threads of the story do not come together well, and there is a sense of coolness and detachment towards the characters. This a challenging but rewarding novel.Robin Friedman
This novel is narrated by Rose, who lost her mother as a three year old and her careless and reckless father when she was eighteen. A cousin, Bertram, takes pity on her and takes her in, but in time Rose discovers that "he was not a cousin by blood. Instead he was a cousin to my mother's first cousin; it was a tenuous in-law connection. Laughing, Bertram had worked it out for me - he was the son of my mother's aunt's husband's sister. He was not really a relation" (19). In time, Bertram's girlfriend boots Rose out, which is how she ultimately winds up in New York as a sort of secretary/nanny/servant/undefined assistant to the Mitwisser family. The Mitwisser family, father Rudolf, wife Elsa, daughter Annaliese, three sons, and a toddler daughter, have fled Berlin, penniless. In time, Rose understands that the family is supported by James A'Bair, the heir to a fortune his father made selling books called The Bear Boy, of which James was the star. Although largely from Rose's perspective, the novel does have flashbacks to reveal James' childhood as a reluctant star of his father's bestselling books. In fact, Ozick based the character off of Christopher Milne, the son of the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh. James resents his childhood and seems hell-bent on blowing through his fortune. In time, it becomes clear that the Mitwisser family is merely a living doll house for the heedless heir, James. As an idolized child star, James received dozens of presents in the mail, none of which captured his attention the way a doll house did: "Wherever he ordered them to go, they went - he had only to grip their yellow heads with his fingers. And sometimes he told them not to move at all, to stand very still in such and such a position. They always obliged him" (173). Seemingly randomly, James selected the poor Mitwisser family to install in a similar house. "This house! This whim! Narrow and tall, three stories high - it had the configuration of a doll house" (297). And like the dolls in his doll house, they oblige his every whim. Until he tires of this toy as well. This novel had such a dreamlike, surreal quality to it. In additional, although set in the 1930s, it almost feels like a fantastical story that could have taken place at any point in time after the invention of cars and typewriters. There's little sense of the historical in the novel's setting. Although I enjoyed aspects of this novel, particularly the complexity of the character of James, I found parts of this unbelievable. In addition, it felt like some aspects of the plot didn't quite connect to be brought full circle. But perhaps Ozick was striving for mixed connections between her largely dissatisfied cast of characters. 3.5 stars
What do You think about Heir To The Glimmering World (2005)?
This was a reasonably satisfying read -- good stuff for curling up in bed during a cold night -- but the story of a wildly disaffected, almost schizoid nanny in the house of a family of German immigrants coughs and sputters at its core. The narrator's complete lack of affect is supposed to do something, but exactly what is never clear. Equally unclear is what the poorly disguised retelling of A A Milnes' own alienated son is doing in this book. If you approach it as a sweet compendium of idiomatic behavior, you'll enjoy this just fine.
—Sara
Brilliant. A wonder and a joy! It's the mid-1930s and Herr Professor and Frau Mitwisser, being Jews, have fled Hitler's Germany with their big family. Thanks to the charitable Quakers, known for their tradition of religious tolerance, the Mitwisser Family is brought to New York, to Albany, where the professor begins to lecture at the Quaker college. Mrs. Mitwisser is deeply depressed, however, sometimes verging on the delusional, having had to abandon her high-profile scientific pursuits. (She'd worked closely with Erwin Schrödinger). She has now withdrawn from the rest of the family and lies inert in a remote sitting room. Our narrator, eighteen-year-old Rose, answers an ad in an Albany newspaper and comes to work for the Mitwisser. Actually, the ad is hilariously vague as to just what Rose's duties are going to be, but she answers it anyway because she has to get out of her cousin Bertrand's apartment since he's fallen in love with loudmouthed Communist Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards), and Rose has fallen for Bertrand who, though very kind, just thinks of her as a "kid," which she resents. The Mitwisser household also includes sixteen-year-old Annaliese, three younger boys (Heinz, Willi and Gert) and a toddler daughter (Waltraut). Soon they move to the Bronx because the professor, torn from Europe's great libraries due to the imminent war, has to continue his scholarly study of a heretical group of tenth-century Jews, the Karaites, at the New York Public Library. Interlarded with the story of the Mitwissers and Rose and the Karaites is the story of The Bear Boy. As a child, during the decade of The Great War, this fellow became the model for his father's dazzlingly successful series of children's books. Now in mid-life he's a lost soul who hates his immense wealth and lives a semi-debauched, drifter's existence. That's pretty much the setup, so I'll leave you hanging there. Suffice it to say, the novel's language is rich without being daunting, its plot sprightly, and its structure awe inspiring. I really came to care for these vividly drawn characters, even the cynical Bear Boy, whose influence as patron of the Mitwisser household causes major friction between the professor and his wife. Cynthia Ozick is my new favorite writer. I plan to read everything she's written. Also exquisitely good are her The Messiah of Stockholm and The Puttermesser Papers, both of which I have reviewed.
—William1
Finally an author with a masterful command of the beauty and intricacies of the English language. Half the book follows the narraror, hired as half scribe half caretaker. A fine portrait of the various stark disenchantments of childhood, the woundedness of exile of all kinds, and the inscrutability of the ones who are supposed to guide us. The author is unsentimental about children and describes the mind-numbing nature of the options left to girls of lower middle class upbringing, the obscure rules of servitude, and the lives of refugees among other topics. The discussion of the unusual sect of Jews was hard to penetrate in context but worth the intellectual challenge. The other half of the novel follows the itinerant child and muse of a popular children's book author and his shameless acts of spite.
—Jessie
