Ozick's Old Ode
An Old Man’s Youthful Fascinations Animate Cynthia Ozick’s New Novel
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/books/review/antiquities-cynthia-ozick.html
Cynthia Oznick at 92 is at the late middle of career well grounded in the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the sidewalks, parks and delis (Zabar's!, Fairways!) are festooned with literary lively personages snuffling and shuffling for tasty comestibles and ghostly apparitions heckling the fleshpots wasting their talents on mere corporeal survival rather than scribbling competitively against the multiple-prize winners inhaling all the creative, high-critical oxigen of CPW, Broadway, West End, Riverside Drive.
Taking a break upstate from the fictional/nonfictional superstars cant last more than a week or so lest falling behind the sloggers who never sleep, never lay down a pen, never stop tap tap tap, never hurl a jewel in a waste basket, eat on the fly takeouts and junk and stimulants and meds and blood thinner to fight lower leg and thigh and stomach and back and brain thrombosis.
West 86th and Broadway street signs crow of Nobelist Singer to goad the lesser earthlings of their pitiable output, while CPW towers and Riverside mansions display keep out warnings to those unaffiliated with Lincoln Center impresarium, non-winners of genius grants, without distinguished chairs at Columbia, lacking Pulitzer and National and Arts and Sciences regalities (and those magnificent stipends to repay family loan sharks).
All hail the wannabe Ozicks, those coming up on a century of lonely labor putting peculiar thoughts on paper condemned to be ignored until "discovered" in a 100 years.