Life sentences

Cynthia OZICK is double-barreled. She's an inventive and revelatory fiction writer and an exacting, battle-ready critic; an impish writer of conscience and a creative intellectual. In this quartet of long stories, a supple form well-suited to Ozick's wit and insight, she pursues her fascination with opposites and parallels, and she extends her inquiry into how language can be both liberating and oppressive.

In "Actors," Matt Sorley (real name Mose Sadacca), a has-been character actor, relies on his wife, Frances, who supports them by creating three new puzzles a week for a crossword puzzle magazine, work that "left her confined and furious." Finally, Matt gets a break. A hot young director wants "to restore the old lost art of melodrama" as practiced in the once-thriving, now long-dead Yiddish theater. He's found the perfect play, one loosely based on "King Lear." Initially, Matt is appalled by what he dubs "The Lear of Ellis Island." Yet as rehearsals proceed, the actor who believes that "glimmer and inkling are truth" begins to understand the playwright's trust in "malevolence, rage, even madness." Matt realizes "that fury was truth" as he hears a steady beat within the "wild din."

Matt is standing at the crossroads that orients Ozick's thoughts about the role literature plays in our life. One byway is the modernist preference for interiorization and subtlety, the other is that of unbridled emotion and extravagant gestures. The head versus the heart. Order as opposed to chaos. Ozick explores these divergent states of being in great depth in the novel "Heir to the Glimmering World" and in her most recent volume of criticism, "The Din in the Head." As for Matt, when he releases an "unholy howl" onstage, the story takes a devastating turn, inducing the reader to ask, is this catharsis or laughably bad theater? Is Ozick's sacrificial actor a noble failure or a "charlatan"? Are we more profound when our words are meticulously measured and controlled, or when we rage like a tempest made flesh?

Charlatans abound in the wickedly satirical "What Happened to the Baby?," another shrewd approach to questions of expression. Phyllis, a college student, is charged with looking after her enigmatic Uncle Simon, who, during her Depression childhood, was intent on creating "a wholly new language, one that could be spoken and understood by everyone alive." The pipe dream of universality. But as Phyllis discovers, Simon's mock attempt to trump Esperanto turns out to be the most benign of his scams. Phyllis concludes that telling lies may well be the one true global parlance.