Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00
Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard enough,” says the character who experiences it.
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Cynthia Ozick’s novel “Antiquities.”
Cynthia Ozick’s new novel, “Antiquities,” has roots in a similar idea. As the narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, physically and mentally declines, he finds himself reliving not a day of his life, but rather a relationship from it: a friendship, or perhaps something more, he briefly had when he was 10.