This novel is insightful and interesting--it's also self-indulgent and should have been edited. I found most of the characters unpleasant. ( )

I've started thinking differently as a result of reading this hugely ambitious first novel. I am thinking differently about the nature of things: morality, wealth, love, ambition, personal motives.
Our watchful and nameless protagonist is, like Nick Carraway, more of an observer than a participant, except that she is a pawn in a complicated familial chess match, used by her maddeningly narcissistic richer-than-God mother, various indifferent father figures and predatory would-be lovers all to gain advantage over each other. Raised under such circumstances, she learns much about the nature of trust without ever experiencing its comforts herself.
Ozick offers many literary and mythological illusions, symbolism both slippery and obtrusive, rambling and brilliant observations as well as a keen wit and wry cynicism. There are so many ideas expressed in this novel, so obliquely and amorphously, on such weighty subjects that I do not feel entirely qualified to review it properly. A student of classical literature, philosophy and religion would do better.
If LT is any indication, not enough people are reading this book. I've never read anything like it.

( )