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Foreign Bodies
Cynthia Ozick
#UE7892 Paperback, 255 pages; 2011 (2010) $14.95
Members' Price: $12.71

  She thought: How hard it is to change one's life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

  Reimagining the plot from Henry James's The Ambassadors, Cynthia Ozick's latest novel centers around Bea Nightingale, a fiftyish divorcée living in New York in the 1950s, who finds herself bullied into traveling to Paris at the behest of her estranged brother to retrieve a nephew, Julian, whom she hardly knows. Bea becomes an accomplice to both Julian and his sister, Iris, in their attempt to escape their overbearing father in the City of Light. In the course of a few months, Bea's collusion with her niece and nephew takes her from Paris to Hollywood, where she spies on her brother, meddles with her possibly insane sister-in-law, and confronts her ex-husband--inevitably (and inadvertently) wreaking havoc in her wake. At once comically entertaining and chillingly tragic, Foreign Bodies is an intelligent literary novel that proves itself worthy of its Jamesian inspiration. (AG)