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...