John Freeman

An unabashed champion of high art, Cynthia Ozick's sensibility occasionally feels as anachronistic in our celebrity-obsessed world as a rotary dial telephone. But this new collection of essays proves her intellect will never go out of style.

With typical argumentative brilliance, Ozick takes up literary figures, from Sylvia Plath to Henry James, and draw from their life and works the issues that made them so controversial. In many cases, Ozick notes how misunderstandings about an artist's work arise when the artist becomes a celebrity.

The attacks on Helen Keller's writing, for example, reveal how assiduously the public tried to demarcate what the imagination can and cannot see. John Updike's greatest frisson is with God, not eros, she notes. Saul Bellow's novels have been mistakenly plundered for "blunt information," when what they truly provide is something more intimate.

"Invention has little capacity for the true to life snapshot," Ozick writes, in one of her many musings on how confusing the artist with the artistry degrades us. "It is true to is own stirrings." We read not to meet the writer, Ozick points out, but to listen to "the secret voice in the marrow" of their bones.

"The Din in the Head: Essays"

By Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin, 243 pages, $24

(2006-07-25)

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