“I love Strether,” cries one of the secondary characters in Henry James’ 1903 novel, “The Ambassadors,” on which Cynthia Ozick’s new novel, “Foreign Bodies,” is based. 

“Everyone loves Strether,” echoes another character, adoring the protagonist, Lambert Strether, an American sent as “ambassador” to Paris to bring home a wayward young man, wanted by his widowed and wealthy mother to take on the family’s prospering business.

In important ways, Ozick—who was honored this month with a National Jewish Book Award—has fashioned “Foreign Bodies” as an updated homage to James’ work, a writer she has studied—the subject of her master’s thesis—and written about in essays such as “What Henry James Knew” and “Henry James, Tolstoy, and My First Novel” during her long career as reader, critic and fiction writer. 

The basic plot, that of a New World ambassador mandated by a family member to capture the Europhilic young man, remains the same. But instead of the endearing Strether, Ozick has created Bea Nightingale (née Beatrice Nachtigall), a not particularly lovable woman, directed by her brother, the distinctly unpleasant “white-shoe Princeton” Marvin, to retrieve his son, Julian, who has been roaming around Paris in the early 1950s. After not hearing from his son for nearly a year (though Julian does write to his sister, Iris), Marvin, who lives and prospers in California, more or less demands that his New Yorker sister, with whom he is not at all close, fly to France on his dime to perform the unpleasant task neither he nor his apparently ill wife can or will do themselves.

Ozick’s women are difficult, often in the best of ways. Rosa, of “The Shawl” (1989), which comprises the internationally anthologized short story of that name and the longer, brilliant novella, eponymously titled, makes the reader sweat. With a prickly heart and a chaotic exterior, described by Ozick as a madwoman right from the start, Rosa ensnares the reader with her passion, fierce tenderness and mordant humor. Likewise, Ruth Puttermesser of “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997) spends a lifetime working feverishly, accomplishing little, yet she, too, entices the reader’s empathy. Ruth is like one’s crazy cousin, always involved in some ridiculous situation of her own creation, yet one cannot help wanting better for her.

Bea represents another genre of Ozickian protagonist. Not passionate herself, she is drawn to others’ passion(s). Like Una in “An Education,” an older work (“Bloodshed and Three Novellas” 1976), Bea lets herself be pulled and pushed by those with strong wills of their own. Initially, Marvin plays that role. Then, her pianist husband, Leo Coopersmith, takes it on, but eventually they divorce, without children. 

Rather by default, Bea makes a living in Manhattan as a teacher of English to underachieving boys, “wild raucous young thugs who worked on greasy engines; why should they care about “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and how could she possibly make them care?”

From the novel’s first page, a letter she writes to her brother dated July 23, 1952, Bea is hard to know, harder to admire. Apparently passive, sometimes passive-aggressive, she grumbles about what she has to do, then does it, grumbling all the while. “Well, I’m back. London was all right. Paris was terrible, and I never made it down to Rome.” Not only that, but she has failed in her mission of retrieval. She didn’t find Julian; instead a former landlady offered “an inkling of a girlfriend.”

As in James’ novel, the “girlfriend” provides the key to the mystery of the rich boy’s peregrinations in Paris. For Chad Newsome of “The Ambassadors” it is a risqué older Frenchwoman, who, as a Frenchwoman, knows about life and offers the young American an education in culture. Fifty years later, in post-Holocaust Europe, the woman Julian finds is Lily, a camp survivor, now a widow, her only child murdered. Gaunt with suffering and sorrow, Lily offers her young man knowledge of the world’s atrocities, especially those directed at Jews, which the half-Jewish Julian knows nothing of.

His father, Marvin, is a first-generation American who tries as hard as possible to eschew his Jewish background. He marries the Protestant Margaret, moves to California and lets his wife raise their two children in a bland Christianity. Unlike the Chimes (ne Chaims) of “An Education,” Marvin does not hide his Jewishness by taking on a Goyische name. It is Bea who does so, making life easier for her not especially bright students.

“Foreign Bodies” takes us back and forth across the Atlantic several times, adds the characters of Julian’s sister, sent as second ambassador (`a la the James original), and Lily, whose authenticity of character stands out hugely against the rest, as well as Leo, Bea’s ex-husband, who rejoins Bea’s story during her impromptu trip to Los Angeles. Ozick constructs the novel with first-person letters between characters as well as a traditional third-person narrative during a seven-month period in Bea’s life.

One does not have to read “The Ambassadors” before “Foreign Bodies” in order for the latter to cohere. (I read it afterwards.) But knowing James’ work helps bring a writerly perspective to Ozick’s 11th book of fiction. Bea remarks: “How hard it is to change one’s life.” And then, “How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”

To this reviewer, Bea remains perplexing, hard to read in every sense. In her essay, “What Henry James Knew,” Ozick quotes yet another Jamesian character in his later novels, Vanderbank of “The Awkward Age,” who confesses, “The thing is, you see, that I haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun.” 

Bea is not as brutal nor as frank as that, but remains difficult nonetheless.

Annie Dawid’s third book of fiction, “And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family,” is available on amazon.com. She recently presented a paper on Ozick at Portland State University’s Jewish Studies Conference, “Puttermesser’s Crime and Cruel, Unusual Punishment.”

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