For the next year, I’ll be taking part in Pajiba’s Cannonball Read, joining one hundred other bloggers as we read and review 52 books in one year.

The first time I ever heard of Cynthia Ozick I was probably about twelve. Someone gifted my parents with Spy Magazine’s Separated at Birth?, one of those gifty, funny, ephemeral books that you can paw through and giggle at and pretty much rest assured that whomever on your Christmas list still needs a gift will giggle at it, too. The premise is simple: take two celebrities who look alike, or don’t, pair their photos with a witty caption, repeat. It’s because of this book that, in my mind, Carol Channing is twinned forever with Señor Wences’ hand, and Princess Di is interchangeable with Wayne Gretzky. It’s also because of this book that I even know Wayne Gretzky exists.

Anyway, I was twelve (or so), and naïve and curious in the way that twelve year olds tend to be naïve and curious. I wanted to know the world, but my knowledge of it was so haphazard, so strange. Separated at Birth (which I now realize was actually Separated at Birth 2: The Saga Continues), became the shadow puppet theater on the cave wall of my bedroom: Through this book, I learned of the existence of cultural luminaries, but not their context, their names and faces, but not their reason for being. I learned to scoff before I learned to know, and that pretty much explains my entire adulthood, now doesn’t it?

But that’s not where I meant to go with this. What I’m trying to get at here is that the first time I heard of Cynthia Ozick was when I learned she looked like Roger Ebert.

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And let me just tell you that I went to the rare books room at the San Francisco Public Library, where they keep a collection of humorous books, and paid fifteen cents for the librarian to copy this page. For you, internet. FOR YOU.

Now, keep in mind that I was twelve. I read a lot, but I didn’t like to stop and look words up, so my sense of the meaning behind words was usually cobbled together from context clues, and more often than not at least a little bit off. A year later, in English class, I would confidently proclaim that the word vicar meant “some sort of criminal.”(Which is where a stash of Andy Capp comics scavenged from the church Christmas sale will get you). So when I read in the caption that Cynthia Ozick’s novels were obscure, I somehow got it into my head that they were difficult and abstract and beyond my ken, that they were the kind of book that would prove, once and for all, that I was too much a dullard for real literature, and that I should stick to Andy Capp if I knew what was good for me.

Which is why it’s taken me twenty years to pick up a book by Cynthia Ozick.

I’m both sorry I waited so long and happy to be here, 32 years old, tasting one for the first time, with a whole shelf of undiscovered Ozick to work through (as an aside, Undiscovered Ozick is the name of my new prog-rock band). She’s so good, hitting it out of the park at every level, from story to idea to language and pacing. I seriously could not put this down. Take that, Spy.

But what I’m trying to get at here is the central tension of Heir to the Glimmering World , namely what things are, how they seem, and how our attempts at interpretation can have ramifications that echo through our lives.

The novel follows Rose Meadows, eighteen years old, “a watcher and a listener,” half-then-fully orphaned and navigating the haunted shadows of 1930’s New York state. When the novel opens, she is living with her father, a morose and deeply flawed geometry professor exiled to Troy, NY after an ignoble career in Thrace, NY’s public high school. Rose is soon pawned off on a distant cousin, whose vivid communist lover, Ninel (that’s Lenin backwards), soon connives to send Rose packing.

Rose finds employment with the Mitwisser family, refugees from a Berlin — and a Europe — that Rose comes to recognize as “a dense volcanic mass concealed under a disintegrating black veil.” The patriarch, Rudolph Mitwisser, is a scholar, laboring in exile over his treatise on the Kararites, an obscure Jewish sect. Elsa, the mother, a physicist in Germany, now keeps to her bed, refusing shoes, sanity, and English. But, wonders Rose, is “she Hamlet, for whom madness is ruse and defense and trap, or. . . Ophelia, whom true madness submerges?” The children, except for baby Waltraut, are all tall, long-limbed and dark, Anneliese, the eldest and the house’s de facto head, is regal and aloof, her brothers, Heinrich, Gerhardt and Wilhelm, an indistinguishable mess of rowdy, rapidly Americanizing voices.

Housed in the outskirts of New York City, the Mitwisser family occupies a sort of fever-dream. Rudolph disappears into the New York City Library during the day and locks himself in his library at night, in pursuit of some dark, mad truth. Elsa plays cards, destroys small objects, and secrets Rose’s money beneath her mattress, while Waltraut keeps to her crib, silently watching for passers-by and shrinking from her mad mother’s touch. They are kept afloat by a mysterious benefactor, James A’Bair, whose childhood antics were captured by father in a successful series of children’s books. Dissolute, profoundly unsatisfied, all image and no essence, James throws the Mitwisser’s world dangerously askew, providing and withholding with an ever-changing, capricious whim.

For Rose, and the Mitwissers, the past is as fickle a patron as James A’Bair, doling out punishment and reward seemingly at random. But the light that glimmers throughout this world does not come only from the past’s broken shards. There’s the glimmer of surprise, of hope, the sense that, in the end, nothing need ever be what it seems.