Self-consciousness about writing fiction can lead to overindulgent prose and the substitution of egoism for ideas. Cynthia Ozick is the most self-conscious writer I know of. Yet she steadfastly shuns overindulgence of any sort, and instead does what too few contemporary fiction writers do on a regular basis—think. Ozick is obsessed with the words she puts on paper, with what it means to imagine a story and to tell it, with what fiction is. The result is a body of work at once as rich as Grace Paley's stories, as deeply rooted in Jewish folklore as Isaac Bashevis Singer's tales, as comically ironic as Franz Kafka's nightmares….

She debates what fiction should strive to embrace: "incident versus event; experience versus consequence; deed versus outcome; feeling versus connecting; seeing versus seeing-into…." These tensions are ever-present for Ozick.

A perfectionist, she has written just one novel, Trust, and three...