Cynthia Ozick is a woman, and Jewish, and a New Yorker; these conditions in combination might be expected to produce a narrow art, if any at all. And certainly there are few men in [the stories which make up Levitation], fewer gentiles, and hardly a single out-of-towner, but the result is anything but narrow; the absentees are hardly noticed.

Cynthia Ozick has the enviable knack of moving, with impressive speed, in opposite directions at the same time; her specialities are prose poetry, intellectual slapstick, meticulous detail, and wild rhetorical fantasy. The result at its best is an audacious and unorthodox balancing of forces, both within the story and within the sentence. Within the story, there is tension between a carefully rendered milieu and the wildly elaborated fantasy which arrives to transform it. Within the sentence, there is a running battle between a realism that describes things as they are, and a rhetoric that takes constant liberties with the appearances….

The story of Puttermesser and her creature ("Puttermesser and Xanthippe") takes up over half the book and contains most of its high points; the fantastical elaboration, ballasted by an intimate knowledge of bureaucracy, of Puttermesser's rise to worldly power (Mayor of New York, inevitably, given the book's priorities) is oddly balanced by a matter-of-fact account of her progressive gum disease.

The pair of sketches entitled "From A Refugee's Notebook" are by far the weakest in the volume. The first portentously analyzes the décor of Freud's house in Vienna; the second is a surprisingly leaden fantasy about a craze, on the planet Acirema (which no doubt should be read backwards), for Sewing Harems: groups of women who can be hired to sew themselves together. These fragments contain the ingredients of Cynthia Ozick's successful fiction, but wilfully separate them into one piece of non-fiction and one aimless improvisation.

When the materials are properly combined, the results are formidable; the text flushes with the idea of Jewishness and the idea of New York. The sense of history and the sense of place become resources of fact and feeling for an entirely new enterprise, and the whole unlikely rocket takes off, trailing sparks and coloured rain. After a vivid and exhilarating flight, admittedly, all that comes clattering down through the trees is a scorched stick; but with very little more discipline and expertise Cynthia Ozick will produce fireworks that can carry passengers.