Cynthia Ozick has stood immortality on its head. What fails and dies in her clenched and scintillating parable is learning and knowledge. What lives is life.

The publishers call "The Cannibal Galaxy" a novel; perhaps novella is more like it, because it is a single sunset, not a chain of days. The sunset is for Principal Joseph Brill of the Edmond Fleg School, set beside an unnamed Great Lake….

Brill has studied astronomy, but he can't quite give himself to the galaxies. He is too cunning for the stars—and too middling. "Middling" is a key word; it is Ozick's word for the mortal Philistinism of knowledge, for the academy, for the critic….

Ozick writes with irony and wit, but her book is not one more satire of academic life. Beyond her wit is a flinty metaphysical poetry. And Brill's school stands for something much more than itself: the deadness of that which seeks to endure through preserving itself. Brill feels an access of foreboding: the perpetual youthful renewal attributed to teaching is a sham, really….

The foreboding is the first eddy before the storm arrives, in the person of a parent. Hester Lilt is a frumpy eminence, a scholar whose works bear such titles as "Metaphor as Exegesis." (p. 1)

[Brill] has presented himself to her, with wry self-disparagement, as a failed thinker, but she will have none of it. It is not that he has failed, she says; it is that he has stopped too soon. Stopping too soon, turning back to secure what is achieved instead of pressing on, it is her pronouncement upon him, and it is the book's pronouncement upon the myriad sinecures that infest our world of intellect and turn it into a vast and rigid bureaucracy.

But there is more to "The Cannibal Galaxy" than the duel between a live intellect and a stratified one. It is the life itself that Ozick is after; and beyond Hester Lilt there is her daughter, Beulah. If Hester humbles Brill, Beulah unseats him.

Beulah is mute and vacant—an underachiever. Brill struggles to arouse her but Beulah won't be aroused.

Hester refuses to treat her daughter as a problem to be worked upon. Instead, she sends Brill her latest paper, an essay on the fertile and significant properties of silence.

And Brill telephones her, in furious triumph. So all her brilliant theories and metaphors are no more than an effort to explain her daughter. Hester hangs up.

Years later, a kind of answer comes. Beulah has become an avant-garde painter, a Parisian sensation. Asked about her childhood education in America, she says she doesn't remember it.

Ozick has made her meaning plain. If Beulah's muteness was the seed of Hester's brilliance, it is a glory, not a shame. It is life, the willingness to respond to it, that preserves the intellect from its own corruption. Ars, in other words, brevis; vita lunga. (p. 7)