It makes sense that Cynthia Ozick, a natural essayist, has made the novella the preferred vessel for her fiction. In the 1970s, she made her reputation as a fiction-writer with stories, and her two most celebrated novels, “The Puttermesser Papers (1997)” and “The Shawl (1980)” comprise linked stories. In Ms. Ozick’s nimble hands, a novella — 30 to 70 pages long — can accomplish as much as an essay, sketching out a premise, holding a number of ideas up to the light. At their best, novellas trace a graceful course through ambiguous ideas, and end on a note of poised paradox.

And as Ms. Ozick’s best essays, bracketing her early feminist writing, take art as their subject matter, her fiction tends the same way. “Dictation: A Quartet” (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $24), a gathering of leftovers related, very subtly, by theme, speaks to this strength. The title story considers the amanuenses of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, respectively. And the notion of untoward influence — of an amanuensis over her employer, for example — governs the other three stories. Like much of Ms. Ozick’s best recent work, these are therefore stories about literature, at least allegorically, and their inner drive is essayistic, speculative, and does not always give us what we expect from fiction: other lives, fully inhabited. Ms. Ozick has been famously ambivalent about this last, the authority of fiction. Her early critical work took up the second commandment — the prohibition against idol worship — and wondered if fiction was not a false god, an essentially dishonest value. In recent years, however, she has defended fiction unambiguously. Her critical collection “The Din in the Head” (2006) was greeted in some quarters as an overzealous, and perhaps overprotective, advocacy of the literary canon.

Few longtime Ozick fans will be surprised that she treats James as a kind of pet, in “Dictation.” Ms. Ozick has written, with halfhearted regret, about how much James once influenced her — she dropped out of graduate school and wrote a Jamesian novel. More recently, in the Threepenny Review, Ms. Ozick conducted an interview with an imaginary James, flustering “the Master” with questions relating to her feminism and his homosexuality.

Perhaps the last in a long (but recent) line of fictional versions of Henry James, hers is the most ninnyish. “I note sir,” says James to a skeptical Conrad, “that you observe with some curiosity the recent advent of a monstrously clacking but oh so monumentally modern Remington.” James’s amanuensis — the historical Miss Bosanquet — soon steals the show from the typewriter and, thankfully, James. She is an admirable bluestocking, an adventurer in the city who draws Conrad’s more mousey secretary, Miss Hallowes, into the bohemian nightlife of early 20th-century London. But this brief sketch of female friendship must be twisted to the purpose of Ms. Ozick’s ingenious plot: The two secretaries decide to transpose two swatches of prose from each author’s typescript, making a test of authorial vanity. While proofreading, James will assume that Conrad’s fine sentence is his own, and vice versa. The scheming required to produce this fizz of literary fun short-circuits our growing interest in Miss Bosanquet’s manipulative personality.

“Actors,” the best of the four stories, suffers a similar fate. We learn all about Matt Sorley, a small-time actor who considers himself too good for auditions. At once a devoted minimalist and a Chaplinesque mimic, he despises the offer to play a Lower East Side King Lear in the style of Yiddish melodrama. But he takes the role, and falls in love with howling, “the gonging of his own rib cage.” Already an old-timer, Matt is poised to have the breakthrough of his career.

Originally published in the New Yorker in 1998, “Actors” anticipates the maelstrom of pseudo-Singerian, post-Yiddish literature that has earned so much praise in the last decade — and Ozick obviously understands the stylishness of her material. In the story’s final scene, just as we are about to learn whether Matt can win over an audience of cynical New Yorkers, a senile veteran of the old Yiddish theater rises to heckle him, and it is the heckler — the genuine article himself — who brings the kiss of death to this melodrama: laughter. This makes for good thematic closure, but it kills the story.

Yet this is what Ms. Ozick wants. As far back as 1982, John Leonard observed that “a story by Cynthia Ozick sticks its neck out and then bites its clavicle or — giggling — cuts its throat.” One of the stories here, “At Fumicaro,” dates from 1984, and serves as a decent demonstration. After a strong setup, introducing Frank Castle, a hyper-accomplished but not arrogant Catholic intellectual who, at a conference in Italy, elopes with his chambermaid, Ms. Ozick quickly tightens her knot. Frank cannot understand, intuitively, why he is falling for this unlikely match, until Ms. Ozick unpacks her rococo plot point: that Frank’s spiritual fall, from intended celibacy, will be punished by a lifetime of his wife’s tedious peasant piety.

The neat symmetries at work in “Dictation” are entertaining, aided as they are by Ms. Ozick’s fleet style and always-refreshed vocabulary. And the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: A fascination with cultural authority gone wrong, despite their being written in different decades, unites these novellas — much as related essays would unite a good critical collection.

blytal@nysun.com