Admit it — if you aren’t seventysomething yet, sometimes you wish you were, because then you could get away with speaking truth to power whenever the bloody hell you felt like it: either because no one would dare to punch a silver-haired dissenter in the mouth, because the elderly have acquired a lifetime of confidence and wisdom, or because nobody listens to them anyway. Born in 1928, Ozick — who’s always been worth a listen — admits to having been more naive and gullible when she was young. But now in this collection of essays about fellow literary figures, she fearlessly skewers hypocrites, anti-Semites and other shatterers of what we love about Western civ. Susan Sontag is dead, but that doesn’t mean Ozick goes any easier on her for making moral relativism into an international fashion, turning whole generations onto the lethal idea that nothing is better than anything else.
Grade: A
