E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ozick on tour The novelist finally hits the road BY DANA KLETTER

As a writer of fiction, essays, and reviews, Cynthia Ozick, now 76, can be thought of in company with some of our greatest and most versatile authors — Saul Bellow (as a Jewish novelist), Boris Pasternak (as a literary polymath), and Virginia Woolf (as an important female essayist). Her novels and short stories are dense, magical, funny, and tragic. Her essays and reviews are erudite and powerfully argued. Her new novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, is set in the years between 1933 and 1938, the brink of war and disaster. The book’s narrator, 18-year-old Rose Meadows, answers a cryptic advertisement and finds herself employed (or enthralled or enslaved) by a strange refugee family, the Mitwissers, and their somewhat sinister benefactor, James A’Bair, who’s heir to the millions his father made by fashioning his son into the whimsical subject of a series of children’s books. After being renowned scholars in Berlin, the Mitwissers are displaced and bereft in New York, their five children neglected. Their power has been reconfigured into fury and madness. And they have grown dependent on the unstable A’Bair. Rose becomes the chronicler of their secrets and mysteries. Here’s what Ozick had to say about her book and the book tour — her first — that brings her to Brookline Booksmith next Thursday.

Q: You were on the Today show!

A: I haven’t been up that early in the morning since high school.

Q: Have you been on television before?

A: I had a really in-depth interview with Bill Moyers once. This was different because it went by in a flash. Anne Patchett recommended my book to their book club. The book was wrapped under a cover and she revealed it.

Q: Voilà?

A: Yes, and with a drum roll, mechanical probably.

Q: After reading some reviews, I was prepared for a novel steeped in Dickens, Trollope, James, and Brontë.

A: During the writing of this, I kept with me as a talisman — a good-luck charm or a blessing or a hope or an aspiration or a friend — E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Nothing could be farther from Dickens. I offer that as a kind of sign that I never had the 19th century in mind. Now what I had in mind and what readers discover, well, readers may be right and I may be wrong,

Q: Perhaps it is the protagonist, Rose, who compares herself to Jane Eyre, turned out into the world.

A: I never thought of her as an orphan girl turned out into the world. I think of her, in the Jamesian sense, as a witness, an observer. She is an eye and I, in both senses. It is a book of refugees and runaways. One of my original titles for the book was Runaways. It explains a lot.

Q: And the character of James A’Bair, the benefactor?

A: I found him through an obituary of the real Christopher Robin. I was very interested to see that he was a living shrine and a refugee from it. He never could be a man, and he couldn’t escape from it.

Q: If this were a 19th-century novel, everything would come out right in the end.

A: There is an inheritance, a wedding ring, and a baby.

Q: But not in the right order.

A: And at what cost, as Mr. Mitwisser says, at what cost?

Q: And you’re on your first book tour.

A: Ah, the dreaded tour. No, really, it’s a sign. It means that the publisher is supporting the book, and I understand that, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. I must say there are very fruitful experiences that come from it. Long lines of signing books, but the experience is kind of startling.

Q: In what way?

A: The line is long, it moves slowly, but it is not an assembly line. Each signing is, curiously enough, an in-depth human encounter, a little window of time with somebody who knows you through your books and wants to say something important to you about the books. What they say makes each encounter not superficial, not trivial, an essential, real human encounter, one after the other. It is an amazing thing, it is thrilling beyond description.

Cynthia Ozick reads next Thursday, October 14, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660.