In Art & Ardor, Ozick's perfectionist, self-critical habits produce a book which surprises and delights on every line, a model—except that her prose is inimitable—of the play of mind over matters of life and literature….

Cynthia Ozick puts everything she has into her essays—and that's a lot: wit, fierce intelligence, supple writing, and an absence of hackneyed opinion. Her subjects include literature, Judaism, feminism. Beginning one of her essays, you don't know where it will end up or what strange points she will make along the way. An essay on Truman Capote produces an ironic reminiscence of studying literature at NYU in the post-war years, along with unappreciative Army vets….

Ozick's positions are unequivocal and often unfashionable. She dislikes the new feminism which celebrates women's separateness. A "classic" feminist herself, she hates the term "woman writer" and opposes the idea of a female nature, calling it "the Great Lie." She thinks Jewish writers will last only if they write as Jews and for Jews. Norman Mailer will one day be no more than "a small Gentile footnote." Her deeply religious nature attacks what she calls "idolatry," the worship of anything other than God. And that includes Art. The book concludes with two masterpieces of autobiographical essay, "The Lesson of the Master" and "A Drugstore in Winter," which make very personal the point about idolatry. Her sterile and premature obsession with Henry James postponed her own growth as a writer. She herself was a worshiper of art, an idolater. Her conversion came late, which explains the virulence of her dislike of idolatry.