DISCOVERIES

QUARREL & QUANDARY Essays By Cynthia Ozick; Alfred A. Knopf: 248 pp., $25

It is not unlike falling in love, I am ashamed to say, reading the essays of Cynthia Ozick. Here is a mind that is gentle and fierce all at once, a mind that invites you in, a mind that embodies literature’s finest potential: the strength and rigor of formality combined with the flexibility and vigor (the sap) of creativity. Each new book of Ozick’s has a greater force than the last. Here she compares Dostoevski’s youthful idealism and middle-aged anti-radicalism with that of the Unabomber. She writes of the “sublime” writing of W.G. Sebald, like Thomas Mann’s but more “translucent.” She calls Franz Kafka the 20th century’s “valedictory ghost,” who wrote of modern totalitarianism with the “poised realism of metaphor,” different from political writers like George Orwell because he writes from “insight--not premonition.” She sets the chess pieces on the board of American intellectual life and names them: the public intellectual (who knows that “history is where we swim”), the literary icon (a writer who is never read) and others. She describes the board they play on: journalism, fiction (“liberty at its purest”), history (“what we make out of memory”), essays (“essayists in their stillness ponder love and death”), poetry (“How strange that, scooping up words from the self-same pool that everyone else draws from, a poet will reconfigure, startle, and restart those words!”). She writes of the “selfishness of art” and how it “attaches itself to the utilitarian.” She says, unfond as she is of gender- or place-inspired criticism, that literary women, from Emily Dickinson to Susan Sontag, last longer on history’s shelf because they “speak in the language of life, not of monument.” “The Diary of Anne Frank” she calls “an explosive document aimed directly at the future.” These are more than words on pages to Ozick. They are ladles, filled with a delicious, savory stew.

A BLIND MAN CAN SEE HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU Stories By Amy Bloom; Random House: 164 pp., $22.95

Amy Bloom cuts deep. It is not unusual for a reader to cry after one or two pages of an Amy Bloom story, and for who knows what reason? It is not unusual to hear writers refer to Bloom as the Ingmar Bergman of literature. In one of these stories, “Light Into Dark,” a mother says of her son that “there is a knot in his heart,” which made me understand that Bloom ties and unties knots in the hearts of her readers. She is, after all, a practicing psychotherapist. It would not be wrong, if you are feeling wound up and out of touch with yourself, to read Bloom as a heart tonic. She writes, in these stories, about the different kinds of love: gender to gender, generation to generation. She writes, for example, in the title story, about a mother nursing her daughter through a sex-change operation. She writes, in “Night Vision,” about a black son who slept with his white stepmother one time, on the night after his father, her husband, died. She writes the anger a mother feels after her child has died. Identity is fluid in Bloom’s stories: Who is gay? Who is straight? Who is the mommy? Who is the child? These things get muddled, as they do in real life. “Ellie knows it is Charley’s lips and tongue,” Bloom writes of a lesbian helping her friend Charley care for his wife, who is having chemotherapy, illicitly kissing him in this scene, “and she feels them with the muffled longing of a woman watching rain fall.” Rich in forgiveness, these stories make you realize how badly you needed to be watered.

THE MILE HIGH CLUB by Kinky Friedman; Simon & Schuster: 224 pp., $23

Should high-plot, high jinks novels--full of police, private investigators, terrorists and stiletto blonds--be held to the same standards as literary novels with deeper characters and quieter contexts? Yes. They may be different species but they are the same phylum. Kinky Friedman, with his Texan insouciance and his romantic cowboys, has a little too much Tom Robbins in his writing to be discarded with the rest of literature’s playboys. His cigar-smoking, espresso-drinking country singer turned private investigator hero, known to friends who frequent his Village loft as “the Kinkstah,” is not the kind of guy you’d want to sit next to on an airplane. But Khadija, the beautiful Arab terrorist, does, leaving her little pink Barbie suitcase in his possession. Lots of people want the suitcase, from the State Department on down. There’s an old girlfriend, who calls him Dickhead, and several friends with unsavory careers like journalism and spying. Kinkstah calls a phone a “blower,” the bathroom “the rainroom,” etc. And for all the heavy plot, it is not a novel bereft of wisdom: “Love was blind,” thinks the Kinkstah, and life is “its seeing-eye dog--more kind, more beautiful, more beautiful than love itself could ever be. The kind leading the blind.” Now that is useful information.