Though few thinkers still bother to attack it, let alone go on proclaiming its death, the novel remains exceedingly well defended, commanding larger, more ferocious armies than such a modest institution requires. Indeed, protecting novels from all threats, real and imagined, seems at times to constitute a more vigorous cultural enterprise than the actual writing of the things.

The form's latest self-styled guardian is Cynthia Ozick, an accomplished novelist herself and a high-ranking literary critic who, along with so many other traditionalists, cherishes the belief, now quixotic, that serious fiction and those who dream it up are still controversial enough to be embattled and "in danger of obsolescence." In "The Din in the Head," her new collection of essays, many of them written for publications like The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review, Ozick sounds the latest of a million warnings about the oft postponed catastrophe that only novelists still fear, despite their perennial attempts to make the public dread it, too.

"But if the novel were to wither — if, say, it metamorphosed altogether into a species of journalism or movies, as many popular novels aready have — then the last trustworthy vessel of the inner life (aside from our heads) would crumble away."

If novelists were all to go on strike someday, the world might finally understand that it can't live without them, as they insist, but since they can't seem to bear to drop their pens, society must rely on fuzzier evidence for the alleged necessity of their services. In essay after essay, Ozick seeks to provide this evidence by praising her favorite fiction writers in ways that bring out both their virtues as individuals and their glories as a class.

"John Updike: the name is graven. It stands, by now, alongside Cather, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, those older masters who lay claim to territory previously untrafficked, and who make of it common American ground." The opening sentences of the book's fourth piece are typical of Ozick's high-church manner, which sometimes seeks to persuade through extra syllables and weighty antiquarianism as much as through conventional argument. Her prose is not opaque, but like stained glass it sometimes captures more light than it transmits. "This singleness, this historyless aloneness," she writes of Updike's characteristic mood, "turns up in the essayistic aperçus and musings and final exhalations that thread through both plot and plotlessness, alongside the daily vernacular, between, so to speak, the acts."

Ozick, a champion of the elevated and an apologist for the complicated, has every right to discourse from on high, but sometimes she addresses the angels exclusively. Her point about Updike, once she gets around to making it and empties herself of incantations ("His effects are of sheen and shadow, color and form, spine and splay, hair and haunch"), is that he knows how to ground his large abstractions in small particulars.

Ozick, at times, has more trouble in this regard, though her essays can be clear and telling, too, colored by an autumnal sense of loss over the novel's marginalization as "the holy vessel of imagination." In a piece on her beginnings as a writer in the early 1960's, she takes us stage by stage through her transformation from idealistic acolyte to tempered practitioner. It's not Ozick who changes, but the world as it loses its 19th-century appetite for four-course Cordon Bleu Tolstoyan prose. In the past, she suggests, novelists could rely on a nearly infinite attention span from their audience, but TV and the movies have wrecked all that. She ends the piece defiantly, refusing to recant her youthful ambitions and her dreams of "dominion, energy and honor." For Ozick, the disappearance of the old order is not an event to be passively beheld but an outrage worth shaking a Lear-like fist at.

The image of the novelist as a species of intellectual royalty, administering vast realms of mental space with absolute, divine authority while resisting the claims of social relevance and popular amusement, reappears in a number of the essays, and always as something to be revered and mourned rather than archaeologically inspected. In a review of Saul Bellow's novel "Ravelstein," whose sensualist hero was explicitly based on the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, she dismisses the all-too-human urge to identify fictional characters with real-world individuals. The novelist-emperor calls forth his subjects from his own mysterious depths, like Jove; he doesn't depend on found materials. His inventions don't reflect life, they create it, and the culture's growing doubts that such a feat is possible are a tragic measure of its diminishment.

A writer who opts for the feathered word "haunch" over its flightless synonyms, such as "thigh," who calls the speechlike prose of Philip Roth a "dazzling demotic voice," and who knows, as though by instinct, that the proper term for something Saul Bellow-ish is "Bellovian," can be counted on to defend the Western canon — and to celebrate the idea of canons in general. For a civilization to be civilized it must have bars, Ozick asserts. Those bars must be placed high, and the rare minds who manage to vault over them must be regaled with anthems and medallions. In the nightmare regime of blurred distinctions, all will be lost, Ozick hints, and she means all — even our very lives, perhaps.

Consider this Ciceronian crescendo, which rhetorically builds from a statement about aesthetics to an alarmist political manifesto. "A department of English is not the same as a Marxist tutorial. A rap CD is not the same as academic scholarship. A suicide bomber who blows up a pizzeria crowded with baby carriages is not the same as a nation-builder."

The canon as cannon, holding off the savages. Like the rampant jihadists who frighten her, she esteems the written word so highly that she equates its corruption with damnation. She's a bohemian fundamentalist, convinced that if imaginative literature should lose its special status as the final arbiter of humanness, the deity will unleash another Great Flood. But she concedes that it may be too late. Homer may have shrugged already and the fountainhead run dry. Her seeming model of utopia — a world that resembles the 1950's campus of Columbia University — has not caught on as a blueprint for all existence, and appears unlikely to.

In its place, we have tiny islands of high achievement with rapidly eroding shorelines. For the role of Robinson Crusoe, Ozick holds out the critic Lionel Trilling. Throughout the middle of the last century, as literature and the life that it makes possible were going from mostly right, in Ozick's view, to pretty much completely wrong, the valiant Professor Trilling "eschewed softness" and "condemned fashionable self-consciousness and self-pity." Ozick deems his doomed heroics poignant, and she seems to want to repeat them in her own work, refusing to go down without a fight. It's a fight waged largely with long words over big issues that now feel small, not to mention slightly archaic. Nothing gets older faster than an apocalypse that was scheduled for two days ago. If the novel did die a few years back, well, we survived, apparently. And if it didn't, it probably never will. Either way, the din of our destruction is mostly in Ozick's head.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His most recent novel is "Mission to America."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company