Cynthia Ozick Books

Well, not one of Mark Twain's finest, but The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is a good book. It deals with the temptation and corruption that occurs in everyones life. A couple receives anonymous money and is forced by reputation to do the right thing. Whether they and the town do is another situation. Eventually the whole community becomes involved and the righteous owner of the money is to be determined. Although it is a little confusing, it makes the reader think just how much money is the greed of all evil.

I was so glad when I got to page 639 of Trust - it was finally over. I had literally slogged through the last 600 pages of one of the most ponderous narratives I can ever remember reading. Its hard to find a reason to recommend it - the characters are unlikeable, the tone is heavy-handed and pedantic, the plot holds few surprises and is otherwise subsumed by the many philosophical digressions.

Trust is a story of a sad sack of a girl (frumpy intellectual 20-something) in a dysfunctional relationship with the world, "searching" for a father she has never met. Trust is the story of her quest to find him.

Unfortunately, the quest is largely internal, and is sloooowly revealed through the interactions with 3 other (really unlikeable) main characters -- (1) her mother, Allegra, a vapid and extremely wealthy socialite (2) her stepfather, Enoch, a logician and "intellectual", and (3) her mother's first husband, William, a dour attorney who manages the "Trust".

Selfish, self-satisfied, self-righteous - all of the characters are 2-dimensional caricatures of people you hope to never get stuck with at a cocktail party. Everyone appears to really dislike the narrator for his or her own reasons, which are self-absorbed and explored exhaustively. For that matter, everyone seems to dislike everyone, which is one thing I had in common with the characters....

I love Cynthia Ozick's writing and although there are bursts of brilliance, I found this book largely unreadable.