When we first meet the middle-aged bachelor named Joseph Brill [in "The Cannibal Galaxy"], he is presiding as the rather sour principal of a small primary school in the Middle West. Like so many of Cynthia Ozick's characters, he spends much of his time alone, and he is alone because he is guilty of hubris. He has not only allowed intellectual pretensions to calcify his heart, but he has also committed what Miss Ozick seems to regard as one of the worst sins of all—in creating a rigid, self-referential system of education and worshiping something other than God, he has broken the Second Commandment: he is guilty of idolatry.

Idolatry and the complicated relationship between the creator and the thing created has been a favorite subject of Miss Ozick's fiction and essays; and in her new novel, "The Cannibal Galaxy," she examines its implications in terms of both art and human relationships. Although she once wrote that "it is insulting to a poet to compare his titanic and agonized strivings with the so-called 'creativity' of childbearing, where—consciously—nothing happens," she appears to be fascinated by people's continual attempts to "create" their children, to turn them into flesh-and-blood works of art, invested with their own hopes and expectations….

Dense with ideas and philosophic speculation, "The Cannibal Galaxy" is also an organic and beautifully told story of one teacher's attempts to discover his place in history and the meaning of his vocation.

Miss Ozick has a distinctive, idiomatic voice, at once elliptical and allusive; and her moral intelligence uncovers parables in contemporary American life with casualness and sometimes even humor. Because that humor is often directed toward her deluded heros, however, a certain coldness can result; one feels that she not only disapproves of her characters but often actively dislikes them as well….

[Brill is a] French Jew who grew up in Paris …, he attends the Sorbonne where he learns to worship "serenity, absorption, civilization, intellect, imagination." During World War II, Brill is saved from history by a group of nuns who hide him in the basement of their convent. There, in his damp, smelly dungeon, he discovers a cache of books, and the books—a motley assortment that includes everything from catechisms to Corneille—give him an inspiration. If he survives the war, Brill thinks, he will found a school based on a marriage of Hebrew and European Enlightenment cultures….

Brill establishes his school on the banks of one of the Great Lakes….

Instead of achieving a synthesis of two great cultures [Jewish and secular European], however, his school seems to specialize in mediocrity…. Frustrated in his attempts to find a prodigy—that one special child whose talents he can nurture and mold—Brill himself begins to decline….

Then, one day, Hester Lilt, a formidable woman who has achieved intellectual celebrity as an "imagistic linguistic logician," arrives in Brill's life and enrolls her daughter, Beulah, in his school. Infatuated with the mother's air of seriousness and disdain, Brill remains oblivious to the daughter's gifts. She falls through a hole in his school's carefully constructed system, and he dismisses her as ordinary, as dim, as remarkably unexceptional. In doing so, of course, he makes a great mistake—a mistake, as Miss Ozick reveals through several swift cranks of the narrative machinery, that will reveal the narrow solipsism of Brill's own life and mind.