The Hustlers

It is probably this solitude that makes her such a consummate a stylist, though she dismisses this as a bloodless perfectionism and the secret crisis of confidence that dogs it. But her cynical understanding of how importance or fame is secured makes her alert not merely to a writers secrecies but to a public impersonators crudities. Writing is a competition as well as a vocation, and it involved a certain amount of literary hustling all the way from Ezra Pound and T S Eliot down to H G Wells, Saul Bellow and Salman Rushdie.

The essays vary from attacks on long-term myths about literary greats to reflections on the relevance of literature under postmodernism. Ozick defends Mark Twain, Henry James, Isaac Babel, T S Eliot, Saul Bellow and Salman Rushdie to the hilt but that does not mean that she swallows everything about them. She can be a formidable opponent, as the 17 essays here show; for her, there are no literary supergods who energised their writings under the stimulus of some exceptional pain.

 

Every writer has the desire to be recognised which finally comes down to a desire to swim into the essence of oneself, to speak clearly with ones secret voice. All Ozicks literary figures want greatness, success, winning, fame. But all this search for recognition is purchased at a heavy personal price. Eliot had to cook up modernism in London, and then invite his guests, it was not brought to him on a plate. Ozick knows all about how Ezra Pounds prot