Cynthia Ozick’s novel The Puttermesser Papers is a lovely, strange, and descriptive account of a woman apart. I loved Puttermesser and picked up Ozick’s more recent novel Heir to the Glimmering World with trepidation.

There was no need, because it is just as descriptive and lush but with a wider array of characters to examine. Ozick falls in the category of “college fiction” in my mind because she isn’t what I’d call summer beach reading, and I’ve never run into anyone who’s read her outside the context of school or literary criticism. But what’s wonderful about her style is that the bones of the plot are easy to put down and pick back up, while actually reading her prose for a minute or an hour is equally rewarding. Her words fill your mind up.

The mentally ill matron of the German family, as described by the American nanny:

But I wondered still whether she was truly mad, or whether her madness had itself come into being on some scientific plan. World-upheaval had capsized and stupefied her. Then she must answer! Answer disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture; she must refuse and refuse. Once or twice, having refused, she recanted. She had refused her shoes — but now she wore them. She had refused the language of exile — but now she was in thrall to a narrative wherein mind was governance, and a nation was stable, and disorder and fracture were tamely domesticated. She did not protest the language of exile; she was immersed in it, captivated. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness will not recant.

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