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...