Book Alert / Dictation

Dictation by Cynthia Ozick, Houghton Mifflin '08, $24, 179 pages, ISBN #0547054009.

Cynthia Ozick may have entered her 81st year last month, but she can write all but a few American novelists under the table. In her newest, a collection of four novellas, she conducts a clinic for fellow writers, while the rest of us look on appreciatively.

My favorites are her first two, largely because of the contrast between them. In Dictation, female secretaries for novelists Henry James and Joseph Conrad chance to meet in London in 1910 and compare notes on their work as under-appreciated amanuenses for their famous employers. Theodora Bosanquet, who works for James, quickly dominates Lilian Hallowes and seduces her mind, if not quite her body, in a pact that, without their bosses' knowledge will earn them an unsung but real contribution to posterity. The sexual tension between the two crackles as their relationship blossoms. This mannered Victorian novella owes much to Henry James himself.

Fast forward nearly a century and leap the pond for "Actors," in which a Manhattan crossword puzzle writer pushes her husband, a 60-ish marginal TV character actor, to help put bread on the table by portraying Lear in a new production by a newly-deceased playwright. Ozick's take on the interplay between the long-married spouses, in which grunts and eyebrow-raising have become a stand-in for verbal communication, is dead-on. The author loves the unpredictability of life as much as she does quirkiness, so is it any wonder that Lear is upstaged in the end by the round-the-bend 96-year-old father of the late playwright?

Rounding out this slim collection, three of which have already been published in magazines, are At Fumicaro, in which a 35-year-old devout Catholic literary critic marries a pregnant 16-year-old chambermaid four days after meeting her in Italy; and What Happened to the Baby?, about a married and bickering Bronx couple during the Depression. Dictation won starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist.