On more than one occasion Edith Wharton was called “a Henry James in skirts,” a remark that chagrined, irritated, and finally infuriated her. If only someone had said the same thing of Cynthia Ozick, the comparison would have made her day. As a young woman Miss Ozick had a real thing for Henry James. I use the vague, gossip-column word “thing,” but Miss Ozick tells us that, at age twenty-two, nearsighted, departing from graduate school without a Ph.D., she actually “became” Henry James—and not the young, still hesitant Henry James, groping for the essentials of his art, but the elderly bald Henry James, the high priest of fiction, the figure whom Leon Edel refers to, appositely, as the Master.

What Cynthia Ozick is talking about here is a very virulent case of the Jamesian virus—another, earlier sufferer was Willa Cather—whose chief symptoms are an unrelenting dedication to the craft of fiction and the belief that nothing is so important as literature, life itself seeming but wan and shabby by comparison. This virus can hit anywhere; it first struck Miss Ozick when she was a seventeen-year-old bookworm reading between deliveries in her father’s drugstore in the Bronx. At that time, in that place, she read James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle” and decided, then and there, that “Here, here was my autobiography.”

Miss Ozick recounts this Jamesian phase in her life in a brief essay entitled “The Lesson of the Master,” in which she not only takes up her misbegotten infatuation with James as a priest of art but her sad misreading of James, whose true view, as she has come to see, is not that one must deny all for art but instead that one must live life to the fullest. “I mistook him,” writes Miss Ozick, “I misheard him, I missed, absolutely and irrevocably, his essential note.”

In another of her essays, Miss Ozick once again strikes the note of regret:

In my twenties I lived the life of the elderly Henry James. In my thirties I worshiped E.M. Forster for the lure of his English paganism. Fifteen years went into a silent and shadowed apprenticeship of craft and vision. When at last I wrote a huge novel I meant it to be a Work of Art—but as the years ground through that labor, it turned, amazingly and horribly, into a curse. I discovered at the end that I had cursed the world I lived in, grain by grain. And I did not know why. Furthermore, that immense and silent and obscure labor had little response—my work did not speak to the Gentiles, for whom it had been begun, nor to the Jews, for whom it had been finished. And I did not know why. Though I had yearned to be famous in the religion of Art, to become so to speak a saint of Art, I remained obscure.

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The “huge novel” referred to in this passage is her first, Trust (1966). She also refers to it, in an essay otherwise having to do with feminism (“Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog”), as “an enormous novel, the writing of which had taken many more years than any novel ought to take.” Trust must be reckoned Miss Ozick’s pledgeship to the fraternity of literature, and it was not, as she avers, an easy one. It is an exhausting novel; it is also a badly misshapen and sadly misconceived one. It is a book filled with lengthy opaque paragraphs, heavy-handed symbolism, vast stretches of overwriting, flat jokes (most of them involving puns), and a general over-richness such as can cause one’s mental teeth to ache.

In a reconsideration of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Miss Ozick called the book “the novel of someone who wanted, with a fixed and single-minded and burning will, to write a novel.” Her own Trust is just such a novel, by a writer who was herself stuffed with literature. One can read back into it—with its talk of the Holocaust, radical politics, the death of Europe, the social classes, muses, literary puzzles, the meaning of money—nearly every literary preoccupation of the years during which it was written Yet it contains flashes of brilliance as well, such as this nice distinction between Materialists and Idealists:

He’s reading Materialism and Idealism. What it means, you see, is that there are two sorts of philosophers, Materialist and Idealist. One thinks the world is bad and really there, the others think the world is good and not really there. The Materialists—the ones who think the world exists but is bad—believe in God, but hate him for creating a bad world, and the Idealists—the other camp—are atheists who would love God if only they believed in Him.

“Two things are equally boring in art,” the poet Howard Moss has written, “a lack of skill and too much of it,” and in Trust Miss Ozick managed to demonstrate both simultaneously.

Cynthia Ozick’s plight was not an uncommon one among young writers: a flaming desire to Write combined with nothing much to say. By the time Trust was published, however, she was thirty-eight—not quite still young. Like many writers of her generation, she may well have been, if not over-educated, then over-impressed with the importance, not to say the sacredness, of literature. It is not easy to get much work done with such characters as Henry James, E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf hovering about one’s head. The trick may reside in somehow at the same time incorporating and shaking off such influences. Complicated stuff. As Miss Ozick says at the end of her Henry James essay, “Influence is perdition.”

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As late as 1970, in a paper delivered at a conference in Israel, Miss Ozick, almost by the way, could note: “I am a writer, slow and unprolific, largely unknown . . .” But she would not be slow or unprolific or largely unknown for very much longer. Something happened to change all that. The dam burst: stories, a number of extraordinary essays, a novel all flowed forth. Suddenly, Cynthia Ozick’s number came up: she won a Guggenheim Fellowship and something financially more rewarding called a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She was now the subject of profiles in such places as the New York Times Magazine. (Do you suppose they are called “profiles” because, after having submitted to one, it is difficult to look one’s friends straight in the face?) What all high-school girls of my generation sedulously avoided, and what all writers quite as sedulously seek, Cynthia Ozick now had: a reputation.

Although Miss Ozick never tells us how exactly it came about, what happened to her as a writer is fairly clear from the evidence she supplies in her essays.¹ What happened is that she acquired a point of view. (Of a character in his novel Guerrillas, V.S. Naipaul remarks that she had a great many opinions but that these did not add up to a point of view.) Cynthia Ozick’s point of view was Jewish. Not that she wasn’t Jewish all along, but now she became a Jewish writer. Miss Ozick may be the only prominent writer in America who is prepared to let that adjective appear before that noun. “I am not a Jewish writer; I am a writer who is a Jew,” Philip Roth has said. I believe that, on more than one occasion, Saul Bellow has said something similar. In declaring themselves thus, these writers by no means wish to hide or even play down their Jewishness; not a bit. What they are doing is trying to preserve their writing from the label (the accusation?) of parochialism. They are Jews, but their writing, they wish to affirm, is part of Western civilization. Cynthia Ozick apparently wishes no part of such distinctions She considers herself, she wishes to be known as, she is, a Jewish writer.

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What does it mean to be a Jewish writer? Those Jews who like to claim as many vaguely distinguished figures as possible for the Jewish people—the cultural and intellectual equivalent of Jewish kids who can name eleven Jewish American League third-basemen—might wish to list, say, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag as Jewish writers. One can easily imagine their arguments for doing so. Woody Allen’s work demonstrates the rich complexity—self-reflexive yet casting a suspicious eye outward—that has long characterized Jewish humor Mailer’s restless questing for new styles, his ceaseless plumbing of the depths of alienation, offer a near-perfect parable of the modern Jew in the Diaspora. Susan Sontag’s tireless energy for making distinctions, her ability to turn an argument first this way, then that, resemble no other activity so much as that of talmudic study. Such dumb stuff has constituted the substance of a great deal of talk about “Jewish writers.”

Cynthia Ozick is different. She calls herself a Jewish writer because, first, she has given up “the religion of Art,” and, second, takes seriously the Jewish covenant and its commandments. What is more, she believes that it is only through taking such a turn that writers who are Jews have—or, rather, that their work has—a chance to survive. Excluding only those two half-Jews, Montaigne and Proust, Miss Ozick maintains that “there are no major works of Jewish imaginative genius written in any Gentile language, sprung out of any Gentile culture.” Especially do minor writers who are Jews, in her view, fall quickly into oblivion when they try in effect to pass in Gentile culture: here she cites the case of Isaac D’Israeli, now forgotten as a man of letters and remembered at best as the father of the first Prime Minister of England of Jewish ancestry. “The fact is,” she says, “that nothing thought or written in Diaspora has ever been able to last unless it has been centrally Jewish.”

But then how strictly Miss Ozick means us to take her notion of “the Jewish writer” becomes a bit unclear when she claims, in the same essay, that the 19th-century novel, at its pinnacle, was “a Judaized novel,” adding: “George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant; they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct; they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.” Miss Ozick is here defending the novel, and literature generally, against those who view it as having no ideational but only aesthetic interest. Still, in asserting the importance of the Jewish point of view and then citing George Eliot, Dickens, and Tolstoy as exemplars—isn’t this rather like leavening your bread and calling it matzah, too?

Although not a systematic or analytical thinker, Cynthia Ozick can be a provocative, even a startling one. She is impressively unpredictable. Just when one thinks one has her locked into a fixed position, she springs free. For example, Art & Ardor contains three essays on feminism. Two of them—“The Hole/Birth Catalogue,” which is an attack on the Freudian notion that anatomy is destiny, and “Previsions of the Demise of the Dancing Dog,” which is an attack on the clichés about female literary sensibility—are fairly standard feminist fare. The third essay, “Literature and the Politics of Sex: A Dissent,” however, must have given fits to the editors of Ms. magazine, where it originally appeared. In this essay Miss Ozick disavows the label “woman writer”—as, interestingly, she doesn’t disavow that of “Jewish writer”—and sets out the claims, with admirable clarity and fine passion, of imagination over politics. “Politics,” she declares, “begins with premises; imagination goes in search of them.” She delivers a terrific chop to the ideological turn that feminism has taken, when she writes: “Now we are enduring a feminism so far advanced into ‘new truths’ that it has arrived at last at a set of notions indistinguishable from the most age-encrusted, unenlightened, and imprisoning anti-feminist views.” And she closes by maintaining that women who write, like all writers, need not worry about fighting for freedom—in their imaginations they already have it.

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Cynthia Ozick, then, is a Jewish writer who is also a woman; but, in addition, she is a writer of stories and novels who is also an essayist. Many a novelist has performed handsomely as an essayist; and at present among women in particular there are a number of writers—Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hard-wick, Susan Sontag, Renata Adler, Joan Didion—who, so to speak, go both ways. The proper and highest and most academically kosher critical principles call for a critic to ignore a novelist’s essays when confronting his fiction. Yet in Cynthia Ozick’s case this becomes difficult to do, not only because she often remarks penetratingly upon fiction in her essays but because it may well be that she is a better essayist than novelist. (So, incidentally, are the five women mentioned between my dashes two sentences above, though none, I suspect, would be pleased to hear it.)

Brilliant, quirky, profound, outrageous—these are some of the adjectives I would haul into service to describe Cynthia Ozick’s quality as an essayist. Her brilliance, when she is writing at the top of her bent, is very bright indeed, as in her portraits of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton. The Virginia Woolf essay is an instance of brilliance combining with quirkiness, for it turns out to be really quite as much an essay on Leonard Woolf as on Virginia, and it asks, among other rude but interesting questions, what was a nice Jewish boy like Leonard doing in a place like Bloomsbury? The flow of essayistic observation is constant and high: “Candor,” she notes apropos of Leonard Woolf, “is often the mode of the obtuse person.” Miss Ozick rates Virginia Woolf higher than I do, and she also rates John Updike higher than I do, but she is the sort of writer with whom you do not have to agree to find interesting. In writing about Updike’s Bech books, for example, she notices that Bech, a Jewish character, is one of the few of Updike’s characters who has no theological life; he is, as she wittily says, “a secular/neuter.”

If Miss Ozick has flaws as an essayist, these include a tendency, given the wrong subject, to abstraction that almost instantly turns into intellectual Excedrin headaches 51 through 163, and another tendency to wing it on the spirit of imagination alone. For an example of Cynthia Ozick at her most impenetrable, one cannot do better (do worse?) than her essay “Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom,” a title whose arrhythmic sound is matched by prose that must have something to do with the imitative fallacy, for in this essay Miss Ozick has taken an unreadable critic and written unreadably about him—a case, perhaps, of letting the punishment fit the crime. But why should I, an innocent reader, have to sit in a cell with such abstruse prose upon my lap?

Aldous Huxley once defined the art of Montaigne, the first great practitioner of the essay form, as “free association artistically controlled” Of her own essays, Miss Ozick writes: “The only nonfiction worth writing—at least for me—lacks the summarizing gift, is heir to nothing, and sets out with empty pockets from scratch.” I think she is mistaken about her own gifts here. Two such essays in Art & Ardor in which she “sets out with empty pockets from scratch” are “The Riddle of the Ordinary” and “The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck,” and each quickly falls into deadly abstraction and what I think of as undocumented and hence unpersuasive grandiosity. In my view, Miss Ozick’s best essays are those in which she writes about artists, for she has the soul of an artist herself, and entry to the souls of other artists is not barred to her.

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Clearly Cynthia Ozick thinks of herself as an artist—a writer of stories and novels. She prefers fiction to essays for, among other reasons, the sense of adventure and risk that the former provides. “Fiction is all discovery,” she has written, “discovery plotted—fallen into, rather—by character: first the writer’s, and only then the characters’. Even failure is worthwhile—so much has been dared: scaling an edge to find out something ‘new,’ ‘true’—inherent, immanent, encoded—that was unsuspected at the start, and by the end seems both ingenious and right.” This is a bit more abstract than is necessary, but one knows what Miss Ozick means: in an essay one is aware of one’s destination, in a story one is astonished at having arrived where one has. This sense of astonishment is often shared by Cynthia Ozick’s readers, though here, it must be said, astonishment does not always imply satisfaction.

Cynthia Ozick is an original. There is no one now writing quite like her, nor is she quite like anyone else (pressed, I suppose one could tickle out traces of Bernard Malamud, I.B. Singer, and Saul Bellow). Unlike so many contemporary fiction writers, for the most part her creative sources do not seem patently autobiographical. She does not write in yesterday’s bedclothes, which is to say that, although she can be a sexy writer—see, for two examples, her stories “The Pagan Rabbi” and “Putter-messer and Xanthippe”—sex is not at the center of her fiction. As she once said in a memorial essay about Maurice Samuel, “He revered language, but he loved idea more,” so is she, passionate about language though she obviously is, even more passionate about ideas in fiction. “For me,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss . . .” Miss Ozick is far from inattentive to aesthetic bliss, but for her, as she puts it in the preface to Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), “a story must not merely be, but mean,” and in the same preface she adds: “. . I believe stories ought to judge and interpret the world.”

I admire Cynthia Ozick’s sense of artistic vocation, I admire her prose, I admire her views on the point and purposes of fiction—I admire almost everything about her, in fact, but her stories I hope I am appreciative of all of them; I know I am impressed by many of them; and I confess to having been amazed by a few. But for all that I am appreciative, impressed, even amazed by Miss Ozick’s fiction, in the end I am usually left unsatisfied by it. Why, I ask myself, why?

For a time I thought that the difficulty with Cynthia Ozick’s fiction was that she simply didn’t know how to end a story successfully. I thought of her art as comparable to that of a very considerable chess player of my imagining. This player is a man with astonishing openings, stunning defenses, a player who can make knights and bishops and even pawns do things one had scarcely realized they could do, a player with all the moves but one—namely, the ability to work his opponent into checkmate. The analogy is not quite neat, for Cynthia Ozick’s stories do end, but their endings seem to fall far short of what has gone before. They seem to end ineptly. Or, to switch analogies from chess to bullfighting, many an Ozick story seems to me rather like a bullfight in which the matador works the bull with the greatest subtlety and elegance, and then, at the moment of climax, drops the bull with a grenade.

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Take as an example the title story from the volume Levitation, Five Fictions (1982). It is about a husband and wife, both novelists, who give a party. The husband makes his living as an editor. “His manner was powerless,” Miss Ozick writes, in one of her lovely touches, “he did not seem like an editor at all.” He is a Jew; she, the daughter of a minister, is spiritually if not technically a convert to Judaism. As novelists, the one principle they agree on is never to write about writers. They agree on other things as well. Both husband and wife are absorbed by questions of social-literary power; both recognize their own powerlessness.

About their own lives they had a joke: they were “secondary-level” people. Feingold had a secondary-level job with a secondary-level house. Lucy’s own publisher was secondary-level; even the address was Second Avenue. The reviews of their books had been written by secondary-level reviewers. All their friends were secondary-level. . . .

Meanwhile, to their party they invite a number of “luminaries.” Miss Ozick names names: Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler; Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer; William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, Truman Capote. None shows up. Instead the usual crowd does. People divide up to talk about different subjects: theater and film in the dining room; Jews, among them a refugee, are discussing Jews in the living room. The wife thinks how intense Jews can be. “They were intense all the time; she supposed the grocers among them were as intense as any novelist; was it because they had been Chosen, was it because they pitied themselves every breathing moment?”

Details in this story are concrete, anchored in the particular. We have those names of living writers. We have little bowls of potato chips, carrot and celery sticks; the husband eats the last olive. Everything in place, all set—all right, hang on. The living room begins to levitate. The talk by Jews about Jews is apparently causing this to happen. “The room was ascending. . . . It was getting free of her [the wife], into loftiness, lifting Jews.” While this is happening the wife has an illumination about a scene in a city park, in which Sicilian dancers and an anthropologist from the Smithsonian figure prominently, but whose point is to remind her “how she has abandoned nature, how she has lost the true religion on account of the God of the Jews.” Coming out of her illumination, the wife realizes that she is tired of hearing about the Holocaust. She “decides it is possible to become jaded by atrocity. She is bored by the shootings and the gas and the camps, she is not ashamed to admit this. They are as tiresome as prayer.” She returns to the dining room, where the secondary-level people are talking about secondary-level things At the story’s close, the husband and the refugee are “riding the living room.” The story’s final two sentences are. “Their words are specks. All the Jews are in the air.”

I may sound more like a landlord than a critic here, but I react to this story by asking, “Madam, what is that living room doing on the ceiling? Madam, I implore you, get those Jews down, please!” I recognize that Miss Ozick is reaching for something deep and special here. Can she be referring, metaphorically, to the inherent luftiness of Jews, to the spirituality that can set them apart, especially when they speak of themselves among themselves? No doubt she is, and she is no doubt referring to more as well. But the atmosphere up there, in that living room aloft, and in the story “Levitation,” finally seems extremely thin. I prefer my Jews grounded. An artist, I realize, may do with her art what she likes. Yet a reader may say that it isn’t enough.

But then I seem to like least those of Cynthia Ozick’s stories that she herself likes best. The title story in The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971) is about what its title advertises: a brilliant young rabbi who goes pagan, makes love to a dryad (“ ‘Scripture does not forbid sodomy with plants,’ I exclaimed”), and eventually takes his own life. “The Pagan Rabbi” is a piece of dazzling writing; to render an account of lovemaking with a supra-human being believable, as Miss Ozick does here, is no small trick of craft. It is all almost too glittering, too astonishing. It is virtuosity unfettered. And yet it puts one in mind of nothing quite so much as a sentence from Miss Ozick’s own criticism: “In literature it is perilous to be too original in one’s premises—one ends not with a novel but with a fairy tale.”

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In the title story of Bloodshed and Three Novellas, Jules Bleilip, a lawyer who is currently working as a fund-raiser, goes off, out of curiosity, to visit a female cousin who has married into a hasidic community in a new-made town outside New York. Most of the members of the community are survivors of the death camps or children of survivors. A secularist himself, a man “whose vocabulary was habitually sociological,” Bleilip is both repelled by these religious refugees and lured toward them because he “supposed they had a certain knowledge the unscathed could not guess at.” Although the community has a rebbe, he doesn’t, we are told, specialize in miracles. The Jews are there to study, uninterruptedly, in their own way. Bleilip is taken that evening to a minyan which the rebbe attends. After the minyan, during the study hour, the rebbe rises to speak. He is a man of about fifty, wearing a worker’s cap; two of the fingers and all of the nails are missing from one of his hands, the result, we learn later, of a freezing experiment conducted upon him at Buchenwald. As always with Miss Ozick, the details are strong and feel true: “Bleilip reversed his view and saw that the rebbe was their child, they gazed at him with the possessiveness of faces seized by a crib, and he too spoke in that mode, as if he were addressing parents, old fathers, deferential, awed, guilty.”

The rebbe speaks to the matter of the sacrificing of bullocks and goats during the days of the Temple, concluding bitterly, “For animals we in our day substitute men.” Then he turns on Bleilip, questions his motives for being in the room. He, the rebbe, claims that his despair has been transferred to him from Bleilip — “Everything . . . you heard me say in a voice of despair emanates from the liver of this man.” Presently he asks Bleilip to empty his pockets, and when he does so Bleilip is revealed to be carrying a toy pistol. Then, later, after the closing prayer session, the rebbe asks—demands, really—that Bleilip remove the contents of his coat pocket, which turn out to include not a toy but a real pistol. There is an exchange between the rebbe and Bleilip in which Bleilip confesses that he did once kill a pigeon with this gun and in which the rebbe remarks: “It is characteristic of believers sometimes not to believe. And it is characteristic of unbelievers sometimes to believe.” Does Bleilip ever believe? “ ‘No,’ Bleilip said; and then: ‘Yes.’ ” “ ‘Then you are as bloody as anyone,’ the rebbe said. . . .” and returns Bleilip’s pistol to him “for whatever purpose he thought he needed it.”

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Throw a pebble into a pond and nine sages can’t find it. Write a story such as “Bloodshed” and at least one literary critic—me—cannot figure it out. “Bloodshed” is, I realize, meant to be a wisdom story, but its wisdom eludes me. I find it baffling, but I am baffled in a half-irritated and not in a fascinated way such as would stimulate me to unravel what I find puzzling about this story. Rightly or wrongly, I feel the muddle is not mine but the author’s. “Levitation,” “The Pagan Rabbi,” “Bloodshed”—are these examples of the new “liturgical” fiction, the new “literature attentive to the implications of Covenant and Commandment,” that Cynthia Ozick has set herself to write? I must own that I, for one, find these stories willed and schematic (even where I cannot precisely figure out the scheme). Dazzling in parts, they seem extraordinary as sheer literary performance, yet, because the parts do not cohere and come alive as a whole, less than first-class as literature. Cynthia Ozick’s most Jewish stories remind me in fact of the Catholic stories of Flannery O’Connor—both seem to me ambitious, impressive, yet finally, somehow, static.

I prefer Cynthia Ozick’s stories written in a more realistic mode: “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about the travail of an aging Yiddish poet desperately searching for a translator, to “Puttermesser and Xanthippe,” about a middle-aged civil servant who devises a golem that brings about a temporary reform of New York City; “The Doctor’s Wife,” about an older physician whom everyone is trying to marry off, to “The Refugee’s Notebook,” about (among other things) sewing-harems on another planet. I like Miss Ozick’s work least, that is to say, when she is readiest to let her imagination rip; I like it best when she brings her Jews down to earth.

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Ad astra, or toward the stars, is the motto of Joseph Brill, the protagonist of The Cannibal Galaxy,² Cynthia Ozick’s second novel and her first one in some seventeen years. A French-born Jew, a survivor who was hidden first in the basement of a convent, then in a peasant’s hayloft during World War II, Brill emigrates to the American Midwest, where he founds, and is made principal of, a day school that teaches a dual curriculum, made up of equal parts of the Jewish and French traditions, which reflects his own upbringing and education. “ ‘My two aunties nurtured me,’ he often explained, ‘my Torah Tante and my Parisian Tante, each the heiress of an ancient line.’ ” He, Brill, has the highest standards. An astronomer by training, “he was drawn,” we are told, “to heights of every kind.” And: “He was maddened by genius. He respected nothing else.” This Joseph Brill is the most filled-out and interesting character in all of Cynthia Ozick’s fiction.

T.S. Eliot once said that the best method for being a critic is to be very intelligent, but intelligence doesn’t hurt in a novelist either. The Cannibal Galaxy is a book brimming with intelligence, and one into which much sheer learning has been poured. Add to this a good deal of craft and a great deal—at moments perhaps too great a deal—of style. It is not, in the glib phrase of the day, “a good read”; instead it requires—and in my view largely repays—careful reading. Words are put under heavy pressure in this novel; ideas come wrapped in epigrammatic, often poetic language. Miss Ozick has mastered the manner of sliding neatly from the mundane to the grand and back again. The engines of her art here are at full throttle.

The Cannibal Galaxy is, above all, a work of style. Idiosyncratic-ally, characters appear with “long wrists,” “leathery lobes,” “clever nostrils” A male teacher at Brill’s school has “an altogether pretty nose conscious of its duty.” One of his Parisian boyhood friends, now an aged art critic, has “a wrinkled wattle that made Brill think of an emptied-out testicle sac.” Occasionally such descriptions are pushed a mite too far. Some of the mothers of Brill’s students are “nervous divorcées, scratching at their little moles,” when moles do not, I believe, itch. In the classroom we hear “the high and rugged beast-laugh of small children,” when beasts do not, with the exception of hyenas, possess laughter. Students’ opinions wind and wind, “like elongated spittle,” when . . . but enough.

If Miss Ozick lapses into occasional overwriting, it is perhaps owing to the structural needs of her novel; this is a book written with great economy. In only 161 pages she provides the chronicle of a complicated man’s life and the institution, his school, that will give it such meaning as it is to have. Time is handled with delicate care. Miss Ozick will linger over certain key episodes in Joseph Brill’s life—his early education, his hiding out in the convent—and then let a single sentence register the passage of a decade. The overwriting is often compensated for by the elegant writing, of which there is a plenitude: “ ‘What is the Enlightenment?’ Rabbi Pult said. ‘Joseph, the Enlightenment engendered a new slogan: There is no God, and the Jews killed him. Joseph, this is the legacy of your Enlightenment.’ ” Always an interesting prose writer, Cynthia Ozick has become, when she is going well, a remarkable stylist, as I believe this passage about Joseph Brill’s wanderings, during the day of the rounding-up of Jews in Paris, amply demonstrates:

Sweat spilled from behind Joseph’s ears down into the well of his collarbone; it was July. He hurtled himself back toward home for some clothes to take with him; then suddenly grew sane; it was folly to go back. Instead he ran, he ran nowhere; he ran. There were mobs moving toward the Seine and its bridges; he veered, and ran the other way. His throat roared with a burning; his ribs were in agony. He discovered that he was praying for his three older sisters—only what seemed to be prayer of the lung was merely panting and throat-pain. In his new sanity he admonished himself to come to a halt. His legs would not obey. Then he ordered them to show dignity, fearlessness, to slacken, to stroll, to saunter, to walk. At a cruelly casual pace, the blood gyrating in his neck, he wandered through Paris, himself its prey. . . .

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The central drama of The Cannibal Galaxy begins when Principal Brill, as he is known to everyone connected with his school, realizes that among his school’s students is the daughter of Hester Lilt, a European writer of truly philosophical weight, a “primary thinker,” who not only resembles Mme. de Sévigné, a heroine of his boyhood, but who herself, a pure intellectual, was “free of event because she was in thrall to idea.” Having Beulah Lilt to educate, the daughter of a not widely recognized but nonetheless authentic powerful thinker, is the great opportunity of Principal Brill’s pedagogic career. The girl, it turns out, does not test well; the psychological counselor does not view her as promising. What is more, she lives up to—or, rather, down to—these bleak estimates of her ability. She is irretrievably dull in the classroom; on the playground she slavishly follows the school’s most popular girl. The girl is given every chance; radical accommodations are made to encourage her. All to no avail. Her mother takes it all calmly enough. But Principal Brill, seeing his great chance pass him by, is cast into a slough first of perplexity, then of despond.

Ad astra, seeking the heights, hoping for genius, the high road upon which Joseph Brill has set himself has seemed to lead nowhere. Cast down, Brill thinks to pull himself up by a late marriage. “I want my own son. I want someone to say kaddish for me when I die—I want to be normal,” he exclaims. He marries one of the school secretaries, a rather commonplace woman much younger than he. They have a son, Naphtali by name, who early shows the greatest intellectual quickness, power, promise. Hester Lilt and her daughter return to Europe. Time passes. Eventually, Brill, now full of years, is eased out of his principalship. He retires to Florida. He becomes a television watcher, and one day, over his television screen, whose face appears but that of Beulah Lilt. The negligible little girl has grown up to become a famous Parisian painter and, more than that, a theoretician of the new avant-garde. Interviewed about her girlhood in America, she has no recollection of Principal Brill’s school. Brill’s own son, meanwhile, has become a business-administration major at Miami University. (Such a bright boy, one would have thought he could have got into the Wharton School.) Joseph Brill’s life, in brief and in sum, is a sad and fairly complete failure.

It was Cynthia Ozick who wrote, “A story must not merely be, but mean.” What does The Cannibal Galaxy mean? The title refers to “those megalosaurian colonies of primordial gases that devour smaller brother galaxies,” and Brill thinks of Hester Lilt as such a cannibal galaxy. On the last page of the novel, he speaks of her having spoiled his life: “In hindsight he knew he had been ambushed by Hester Lilt.” But how had she ambushed him? Is this only Brill deluding himself? Is the novel instead about the unpredictability of education? Is it saying that true ability is sometimes hidden, only to flame up later at mysterious bidding (as with Beulah Lilt), while young stars that glow brightest often fizzle out early (Naphtali majoring in business; one of the brightest girls in the school doing no better than returning to it as a teacher)? All this comes under the category of “interesting—if true.” Yet its truth isn’t persuasively presented in this novel. How after all did Beulah Lilt grow into this figure of radiant intellectual power? And then one wonders, why is Joseph Brill’s life made to come to so little, why is this extremely intelligent and largely altruistic man brought so low? Was he insufficiently patient with Beulah Lilt? Is he to be damned for lowering his sights toward the close of his life? There is an air of unexplained vengefulness hovering over the harsh fate dealt out to Joseph Brill, and it throws this gorgeously written novel into doubt.

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I seem to have been continually patting Cynthia Ozick on the back while slapping her in the face. But in one of her old churches, which I still attend, where they celebrate the religion of Art, we learn that only truly interesting writers are capable of greatly disappointing. I hope Cynthia Ozick will write a great many more essays, and I hope, too, she ceases to write fantastical fiction. She is a writer who only flies with her feet securely on the ground.

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¹ Art & Ardor, Knopf, 305 pp., $16 95. A number of the essays in this collection originally appeared in COMMENTARY.

² Knopf, 161 pp, $11.95.