We may be living in "an era when the notion of belles-lettres is profoundly dead," as Miss Ozick says in her foreword, but it's thriving in "Art & Ardor," which is by turns quarrelsome, quirky, unfair, funny and brilliant.

Looked at one way, these essays, though originally published in magazines as divergent as Ms. and Commentary, are a unified and magisterial continuation of Miss Ozick's short stories by other names. Admirers of her three story collections … will recognize at once her yeasty, extravagant prose, her intellectual preoccupations (jeremiads against violations of the Second Commandment, for instance—that's the one about worshiping idols) and some of her characters too….

Looked at another way, though, "Art & Ardor" is the work not of one Cynthia Ozick but three: a rabbi, a feminist and a disciple of Henry James. Among them, this trio—old classmates, perhaps, or relatives, but hardly friends—have co-authored a fascinating and very odd anthology of essays about Judaism, women and literature.

As rabbi, Miss Ozick's chief target is idol worship, whose ramifications, she argues, include the Holocaust, Jewish assimilation and much modern literature, all of which are the result of substituting "aesthetic paganism" for moral seriousness. "When a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew," she writes in "Toward a New Yiddish"; he's merely a neuter, an "envious ape" of gentile culture. It follows that Miss Ozick regards most of the writers we think of as Jewish—Proust, Kafka, Heine, not to mention Philip Roth and Norman Mailer—as Christians manqués, the main exception being Saul Bellow, for reasons I couldn't quite catch. (Actually, the writer who best fits Miss Ozick's criteria is Miss Ozick herself, whose fiction does indeed answer her call for "a new Yiddish," that is, a culturally Jewish-American literature informed by a "sacral imagination" and an engagement with history.)… At her gloomiest, Miss Ozick wonders if "Jewish writer" is not a contradiction in terms.

The feminist Ozick, a more cheerful sort, takes on Anatomy as Destiny. "If anatomy were destiny, the wheel could not have been invented; we would have been limited by legs," she snaps in "The Hole/Birth Catalogue," a masterly demolition of Freud on women. She's outraged by sentimentalists who patronize women by comparing housekeeping or pregnancy to artistic creation….

Miss Ozick reserves particular scorn for the "Ovarian Theory of Literature," whose proponents include feminist literary scholars, the author's own college students … and most book reviewers: "I think I can say in good conscience that I have never—repeat, never—read a review of a novel or, especially, of a collection of poetry by a woman that did not include somewhere in its columns a gratuitous allusion to the writer's sex and its supposed effects," she wrote in 1971. (p. 7)

At this point, the Jamesian Ozick takes over. For her, the imagination is a holy mystery and the writing of fiction the only thing that matters. The Jamesian, knows precisely what was wrong with W.R.B. Lewis's biography of Edith Wharton—it left out her life as a writer. She's devastating on Truman Capote's arch early novels—perhaps too devastating, for she denounces "Other Voices, Other Rooms" like someone going after a hummingbird with a chain saw. The Jamesian even knows that worshiping James is a trap: Art may be all that matters, but one can't be an artist if one lives as though that were true. As I'm trying to indicate, Cynthia Ozick has a complicated mind.

All three Ozicks love a good fight, which is one of the reasons "Art & Ardor" is so much fun to read. They share some less attractive qualities too—a tendency to seize irrelevant moral high ground, and to present Ozick as a beleaguered minority of one (to read her on other feminists, you'd think she was the only woman writer who hasn't retired to a lesbian commune to write prose poems about the Great Mother). She draws wild inferences from ideas she opposes and then uses her extrapolations as a club. How could Harold Bloom possibly answer her charge that his theory of strong and weak poets is a covert defense of human sacrifice?

The problem is not that there is a polemic at the heart of most of these essays, but that Miss Ozick's true targets are not always fully acknowledged. Would she have slammed quite so hard into poor Mr. Capote had he not, as she reminds us in a casual aside, once complained of a "Jewish Mafia" in American letters?… Perhaps, but she does favor hit-and-run tactics, as when she drops into a discussion of the late Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem the suggestion that "the seeds of the Inquisition somehow lie even in the Sermon on the Mount." They do? Where? If she wants to say that Christianity is innately murderous, let her stand her ground and produce her evidence, not deliver a one-liner and move on.

Miss Ozick is fond of grand pronouncements, and she delivers them with such confidence one might almost not notice that many of them are flatly invalid…. To help her praise moral fiction, she denies morality to poetry, dismissing it as a "decoration of the heart" and ultimately evil. Forget the religious, social, political and moral visions of Milton, Blake, Dickinson, Frost, Lowell. We go in one paragraph from "Tintern Abbey" to the Hitler Youth.

Such sweeping overstatements may be pardoned as a byproduct of exuberance. A more serious difficulty, at least for me, was a growing sense that Cynthia Ozick's three selves were not very well acquainted with each other. How, I found myself wondering, does she square her commitment to sexual egalitarianism with her passionately traditional Judaism (for needless to say, she has nothing but contempt for Reform Judaism, the only branch that would let her be a rabbi for real). There are those who argue that Conservative and Orthodox Judaism offer separate but equal spheres for men and women, but I doubt that Miss Ozick is one of them, and anyway, separate but equal is not what she wants. Why is it incumbent upon Jews to write as Jews, even if they must first acquire a whole religious and historical education to do so (not to mention learn Hebrew) but anathema for women to write as women? And if biology is irrelevant to a writer's work, why does Miss Ozick discuss the childlessness of Woolf and Wharton at all, let alone bring in moralistic terms like "solipsistic"? She doesn't tell us which of the male writers she discusses were fathers (although we do learn which ones were homosexual). If it matters that Woolf and Wharton were free from household chores, it ought also to matter that John Updike and I. B. Singer are too. Contradictions and excluded middles of this sort are the reasons why my copy of "Art & Ardor" is as heavily scored with question marks and irritated cross-references as it is with passages underlined for saving. (pp. 7, 35)

I suspect that Cynthia Ozick's three selves do not try harder to make peace with each other because they sense it can't be done. The secular drift she castigates as a religious Jew is, after all, exactly what gives her the freedom to reexamine traditional notions of women, and to posit the imagination as sovereign. All the same, it would be interesting to see what she would come up with if she set herself the task of synthesis. For now, though, it's enough that she has given us this wonderful, if sometimes frustrating book—among whose gems, I must not forget to mention, is a childhood memoir, "A Drugstore in Winter," that is as rich and dense as the best of her fiction. The book it so splendidly concludes deserves a wide readership among women and men, Jews and gentiles, lovers of fiction and lovers of ideas. (p. 35)