On the cunningly designed dust jacket of Cynthia Ozick’s new work of fiction, alongside small images of a beetle, a lotus, a stork, and a palm arranged within an oval frame, there are the words “A Story.” The book is indeed “a fictional narrative shorter than a novel specifically” (Merriam-Webster); it could also be described as a novella. It is, I would guess, just a bit shorter than Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which it resembles in its designedly enigmatic quality.

Okay, okay, a kibitzer breaks in, but why are you telling us all this stuff? We’re not in a classroom, you know. True, but it’s desirable (so I think) for a review of a work of fiction to give readers some sense of the flavor of the book at hand while not giving too much away. (Sometimes that can’t be avoided, and of course reviewers have different opinions about what they should and shouldn’t do.) If “enigmatic” sends warning signals to you, this book probably won’t be your cup of tea. On the other hand, if you are easily seduced by sentences that follow one another with almost insolent confidence, weaving their spell, you will probably love it. And if you are already a devoted reader of Ozick, you’ll need no such prompting.

The author celebrated her 93rd birthday shortly after Antiquities was published. Her narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, is (we can guess) just short of 70 as he tells his story, but he is already feeling the sad diminishment that old age brings (increasingly so as his narrative progresses). His dread is mingled with a sense of wonder: Though he seems unable to grasp fully the shape of his own life, he has intimations.

Here’s the premise. Petrie, a retired lawyer, is one of a handful of surviving trustees of the Temple Academy for Boys, a Westchester County, N.Y., boarding school that shut its doors in 1915 and was “converted for use in perpetuity as living quarters for the Trustees.” At the time of Petrie’s first entry (the beginning of the novella), dated April 30, 1949, only seven of the original 25 trustees are alive. They have agreed that each of them will prepare a small memoir to create a collective “album of remembrance, . . . to be placed in the Academy vault at J. P. Morgan & Co., together with the [official 1915] History and other mementos already deposited therein.”

That takes us to page six of Antiquities; by page seven, the darker currents that will disturb Petrie’s self-assured polysyllabic narrative are already apparent. Instead of producing the nostalgic brief memoir — ten pages or so — that he set out to compose, he increasingly narrates his difficulty in reckoning with the past. Before that first entry is complete, he has recounted his father’s sudden flight just three months after marrying Petrie’s mother, leaving her without a word and traveling to Egypt, where a distant relative, William Petrie (later to be famous as Sir Flinders Petrie), is carrying on archaeological excavations. After the father returns, his trip to Egypt is never spoken of. The narrator himself, we are told, did not know of “the effects of this perfunctory escapade” until his “discreet and quietly dispirited mother, in a burst of confession in her seventieth year,” en­lightened him. At that point we have only reached page ten, but the equanimity with which the narrative began has collapsed, even as the carefully composed sentences continue to flow.

The second entry, dated May 26, 1949 (Petrie explains that his project was interrupted by an “unexpected illness” brought on by a rainstorm that drenched the trustees, who were meeting outdoors), introduces the obscure relationship at the heart of the story. After lamenting what he regards as flaws in his draft of the memoir so far (“the wandering digressions, the lack of proportion, . . . how different from the logical composition of a legal brief!”), Petrie adds further self-reproach:

And I have not yet so much as approached the subject of my memoir, which I hope before long to touch on: the presence in the Academy of a fourth-form pupil preposterously called Ben-Zion Elefantin, his Christian name (so to speak) a puzzling provocation, his surname a repeated pretext for ridicule by merciless boys.

I have said this relationship is “at the heart of the story”; you are probably, quite reasonably, expecting me to elaborate. But I will not do so. If you want to read Antiquities, you should encounter Ben-Zion Elefantin without any nudges from me or another reviewer. Plenty of time later to compare notes with other readers. I will say, though, that how you interpret what Petrie describes as his “racking affections” for Elefantin will be closely connected with your understanding of Ozick’s attitude toward her protagonist — and her attitude toward her various readers. It’s indisputably the case that she invites us to deplore Petrie’s prejudices and mock his circumlocutions (which are not his alone but the attitudes of his class). But does she also extend to him a measure of sympathy and even tenderness, apart from the baseline sympathy we owe to any fellow human being? Some reviewers have already suggested as much. I must admit that this strikes me as a misreading.

One last note. By setting the action of her story roughly between 1880 and 1950, Ozick has laid a trap for unwary and complacent readers. It’s true that, apart from the drearily routine prejudice against Jews that runs through the chronicle of Petrie’s years at the academy, he does get news on an entirely different scale from the larger world: most notably, the horrifying reports that come after the “liberation” of Nazi concentration camps (deplorable, Petrie feels, but also probably exaggerated). It would be easy for readers now to pass over that quickly; such events belong to another time. Anti-Semitism is a very unfashionable subject in 2021. How characteristic of Ozick, the consummate provocateur, to remind us that it continues to flourish, that it has even become respectable in various enlightened circles. Nowhere is this stated in the pages of Antiquities, but it is there, implicitly, between the lines.