484
PARTISAN REVIEW
admire. (She refashioned its elements quite cunningly in "Usurpa–
tion," probably the best story in her 1976 collection
Bloodshed.)
Even so brief a plot summary will suggest how central a tale
The Messiah of Stockholm
is for Ozick. As a psychological drama, it
works by Jamesian indirection and nuance to raise a troubling ques–
tion: when is Lars better off, when he is deluded and obsessed or
when, having overcome his delusions, he overcomes, too, his high
calling, stops writing about obscure Eastern European writers, and
starts to enjoy a journalist's popular success? But if the novella con–
firms Ozick's sense of herself as a disciple of Henry James, it is also a
rather complicated act of fealty to Bruno Schulz: it usurps Schulz's
writings by way of extending their posthumous life. Moreover, it of–
fers us an astonishingly apt metaphor for the false messiah: a book
that can tell the truth despite the spurious nature of its provenance.
It chastises us for the ease with which we can succumb to chicanery,
and at the same time it reminds us of our spiritual poverty, which
makes us yearn to find fit objects for our veneration. And we are
right to pause over the book's dedication to Philip Roth. It was
meant, Ozick told me, to signify her gratitude to Roth, the general
editor of Penguin's "Writers from the Other Europe" series, to whose
sponsorship of Bruno Schulz we owe our awareness of that estimable
author. But for all her qualms about postmodernism, Ozick (who
confesses she "admired like mad" Roth's
The Counterlife)
has an affin–
ity with Roth that goes beyond their shared interest in Eastern Euro–
pean writers. Call it a Judaic imperative: an obsessive need to
explore the place where the moral and aesthetic impulses act upon
each other, sometimes in concert, more often in opposition.
What is most impressive about
The Counterlife
,
what lifts it
above even
The Ghost Writer
as a literary achievement, is that it
harnesses the full array of postmodernist devices - the false–
bottomed narrative, the multiplication of counterfeit actualities and
alternative possibilities, "what-could-be having always to top what–
is" - not as ingenious ends in themselves and not merely to serve an
inquiry into the puzzling relations between fiction and reality. No,
Roth interrupts his narrative and brings his characters back from the
dead, letting them revise their speeches and their fates, for a purpose
that must be characterized as moral. The middle-aged dentist dies
during heart surgery, or the same dentist recovers, abandons his
New Jersey practice and family, and emigrates to Israel, where he
joins the Gush Emunim settlement of a charismatic zealot - either
scenario is valid not only as a metaphysical possibility but as a moral
