Dictation: A Quartet
By Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin, 179 pp., $24
Such delicious mischief. Set in and around the London of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the title story in this collection stages an early skirmish in the class and gender wars that would roil the upcoming century.
Offended by the abject anonymity of her role as handmaiden to the Master, spirited Miss Bosanquet, James's typist (or typewriter, as they were called at the time, a more telling term), concocts a grand scheme to leave her mark on history - the literary equivalent of drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Since the plan requires an accomplice, she contrives to meet her counterpart, Miss Hallowes, Conrad's lovelorn secretary, and attempts both the literal and figurative seduction of the dour spinster. Appeals to ego succeed where appeals to eros fail. Cynthia Ozick ingeniously ventriloquizes the sesquipedalian James, but more than that, she creates a literate jest, a short story as rich and entertaining as a high-comic novel.
The other three stories are also vividly inhabited: by a washed-up actor offered the role of a lifetime (but whose lifetime?); a man attending a religious conference in Fascist Italy who gets tripped up by the sacred and the profane; a married couple sundered by betrayal, tragedy, and Esperanto. They enlarge upon reading to architectural proportions.
Love Marriage
By V. V. Ganeshananthan
Random House, 320 pp., paperback, $14
At birth, says Yalini, the narrator of this lyrical family saga, she was placed in her father's arms and "immediately caught hold of his Heart with both tiny fists." By 20 Yalini is much preoccupied with "Hearts" and "Marriages." But as she learns the family history of which she has remained largely unaware, she must reflect on harsher subjects, on civil chaos, displacement, deracination.
The American-born daughter of a doctor and a teacher, immigrants from Sri Lanka, Yalini knows little about her parents' pasts, about the land they came from and their reasons for leaving it. Her youthful solipsism crumbles with the appearance of an uncle she has never met, a dying man seeking reconciliation. For decades, Yalini discovers, he has been a political terrorist, an operative of the feared Tamil Tigers, and the daughter accompanying him has led a life unimaginably different from that of her American cousin.
As if she were stringing a necklace of bright beads, the author relates the stories of Yalini's Sri Lankan forebears in lapidary folkloric narratives, some no longer than a few sentences. Whether she can construct a more sustained plot is a question that must go unanswered until she attempts one. What she does here, she does quite affectingly.
Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
By Julie Andrews
Hyperion, 339 pp., illustrated, $26.95
More than once as a young actress Julie Andrews portrayed Cinderella. To judge from her eyebrow-raising disclosures about her childhood, the role must have felt strangely autobiographical. Her finishing-school deportment to the contrary, Andrews's heritage is hardly top drawer, featuring penury, illegitimacy, alcoholism. All this and the Blitz, too.
Born Julia Elizabeth Wells in 1935, she became Julie Andrews when Mrs. Wells, a music hall entertainer, left her husband for a crooner named Ted Andrews and threw her talented little daughter into the bargain. By the age of 12, Julie, a schoolgirl with the voice of an opera diva, was the main support of her increasingly dysfunctional family, and by her late teens she was starring on Broadway, having waved England and home an ambivalent good-bye.
Even as a memoirist, Andrews remains the perennial ingenue. Any overt theatricality in these reminiscences of her pre-Hollywood years belongs to the glittering others - Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Moss Hart - whose naïve and dazzled acolyte she claims to have been. She seems so unaffected, so natural and confiding, we scarcely notice that she actually reveals very little of herself.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
