2010 book 268

Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies
I don't even know what to say about this book. I tend to like Ozick--her last couple of novels were especially good--but this book was just excruciating to read. It's apparently a reworking of a Henry James novel (I tried to read that one but god was it dull) and manages to be as stilted and slow as a James novel, even though it's mostly set in Paris in the 1950s and is way shorter than the source material. The writing was just not working for me at all--the long letters, the ridiculousness of the characters' actions, the complete lack of any kind of character development or story. Ugh. I really, really hated everything about this book, and that makes me sad.