Weidenfeld £12.99 pp310

The boy of Cynthia Ozick’s title is James A’Bair, immortalised by his father in a series of whimsical and hugely popular children’s books. Like Christopher Robin Milne, whose real-life story suggested the character, James is desperate to escape his childhood alter ego — but the books nevertheless provide him with a fortune when his father dies.

In 1933 James becomes the capricious benefactor of the Mitwissers, an immigrant German family he meets in the Hudson valley. Although he is a pivotal character, the Mitwissers are the book’s true protagonists, sharply observed by Rose Meadows, a teenage orphan who comes to work for them.

Abandoned by her feckless father, Rose is taken in by her cousin Bertram, with whom she falls unrequitedly in love. Unceremoniously ousted from Bertram’s life by his appalling communist girlfriend, Rose replies to a vaguely worded advert and finds herself an ill-defined adjunct to the Mitwisser family. She is part typist to the scholarly Professor Mitwisser, part nanny to his unruly and hostile children, and part nurse to his unbalanced and largely bedridden wife. She lives in the family’s overcrowded house in a remote part of the Bronx on sufferance and without a regular salary: she has nowhere else to go.

The Bear Boy was originally published in America as Heir to the Glimmering World, and Ozick has explained that “the glimmering world is the past. And everybody inherits a past. And it glimmers either happily or miserably. In any case it flickers in and out of our lives. We never escape from it and we all inherit it”.

The Mitwissers have also been cast adrift from their past. Like many refugees fleeing Hitler, they had to leave everything behind, including the status they once enjoyed. The professor is working on the Karaites, an obscure Jewish sect. It is a subject unlikely to result in gainful employment in America. “What was once valued there is not valued here,” he complains. “Here they lack the European mind, they are small.” In fact, the Karaites are no more than “passing shadows, remote echoes, greyly trudging on the farthest rim of history”, and the professor’s work is “of interest to only a handful of others, three or four in all the world”.

Meanwhile, Frau Mitwisser, a distinguished scientist and former colleague of Erwin Schrödinger,the Nobel laureate, has withdrawn from work into a half-crazed world of nursery songs. She resents the fact that the family relies on hand-outs from James, whose charitable impulses towards them remain unexplained — except that, as a child, “the only toy he truly cared for ” was a dolls’ house full of “doll-house people, whose heads he had once pinched, manoeuvring them upstairs and downstairs, his will their will”. James’s attempts to escape his past are doomed to failure because it controls him in the persons of the lawyers appointed to administer his father’s large estate. His inheritance, however, provides the almost fairytale-like plot with its unexpectedly neat and oddly satisfying resolution.

Ozick tells several different but intertwining stories, and a sense of restlessness pervades the narrative, perhaps reflecting the dislocation most of the characters feel. The bulk of the book is narrated by Rose, but some chapters consist of letters, while others describe James’s childhood and his travels around the world as an adult, or follow the fortunes of the Mitwissers’ eldest child, as she and the increasingly aimless and alcoholic James wander around small towns in New York state.

Novels about crazy families run the risk of succumbing to mere wackiness, but Ozick maintains a tight grip on her characters, presenting them as genuinely damaged and disturbed rather than lovably eccentric. Indeed, there are similarities here with the work of Muriel Spark, a sort of authorial firmness that occasionally — and enjoyably — verges on the ruthless. Ozick’s prose is dense, allusive and idiosyncratic, lit up with extraordinarily precise images of the physical world. Readers may experience a twinge of fellow feeling when Rose says of Mitwisser towards the end of the book: “I caught — if not his meaning — his imperative, that urge below thought that beat in his brain. It pulsed against me mothlike, and I snatched it out of the darkening air.” As these sentences suggest, this is a demanding but rewarding novel, occasionally opaque but curiously compelling.

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