Cynthia Ozick

Ozick has a well-wrought story in the February issue of Harper's.

"The Bloodline of the Alkanas" introduces us to a protagonist, Sidney Alkana, who grew up as the daughter of a poet.

Sidney didn't in the process become an admirer of poetry as an art. Nor did she come to admire the 19th century poetic diction that her father would employ in certain conversations.

In her voice we learn: "I did not understand my father's talk. I sensed only that there was some undeniable connection between these enigmatic outbursts and the mundane truth that we were always worrying about money. I was by then a demanding fifteen, shamed by the way we lived in a three-room flat of the fifth floor of a Bronx walk-up."

I'll leave it there, 'lest the IP goblins pursue me. With such a de minimis quotation, I am surely guarded by the shield of "fair use."

I like the story in some small part because Ozick dares do something experts routinely warn against: offer the reader a fairly long period of exposition before anything happens. In the passage quoted  above we are just moving from that opening discussion of the threee central characters, a nuclear family, to a specific time when certain things relative to Dad's literary ambitions did happen.

Of which I will say nothing more.