Art and Ardor

THIS is not your typical collection of essays by an eminent middleaged writer of fiction. You know the sort of book I mean - a graceful miscellany of book reviews, introductions and speeches, all wrapped up and offered to the public less as a book, really, than as a kind of laurel, a tribute to the author's literary importance. The magazine articles collected here do more than stand on their show more own. They jump up and down, they grab the reader by the shirt-front. We may be living in ''an era when the notion of belles-lettres is profoundly dead,'' as Miss Ozick says in her foreword, but it's thriving in ''Art & Ardor,'' which is by turns quarrelsome, quirky, unfair, funny and brilliant. show less