How often is it that a major contemporary novelist opens his latest book with a dialogue between God and man? Or employs for his main characters one human being and a chimp, with an assortment of gorillas and baboons for other dramatis personae? Or seeks to conceive a fable for the future—man after the nuclear "Devastation"—that is nothing less than a retelling of the Old and New Testaments, complete with the author's views on man's (and God's) nature, good and evil, cause and effect, fall from grace? Odd stuff for a novel, no doubt. Yet these are the materials of Bernard Malamud's latest book, "God's Grace," a fable by turns charming and foolish, topical and farfetched, provocative and innocent.

Certain questions immediately strike the reader. Is the boldness of the attempt at neobiblical wisdom and prophecy paid for at too high an artistic price? Are there enough effective scenes and moments to cancel out the troubling elements and the borderline risks?

Constructing fables, we should remember, is nothing new for Malamud. As far back as his first novel, "The Natural" …, his best novel, "The Assistant" …, and many of the splendid short stories in "The Magic Barrel" … and "Idiots First" …, Malamud has been in the fable business, so to speak…. Unlike Bellow and Roth, writers with whom he is mistakenly aligned, Malamud has always had a fondness for telling tales arranged for the purpose of a specific moral lesson; for a story surface deceptively simple, a prose style artfully direct; for an atmosphere marked by the childlike and pristine, even the religious. Moreover, he has not been averse to presenting animals that speak—witness stories like "Talking Horse" or "The Jewbird." I mentioned a fondness for such tales, but I must add, of course, an excellence in execution too, for Malamud, at his best, is a kind of folk artist of genius. Despite his intellectual ambitions, his strong suit has always been writing from the gut, a kind of literary primitivism. Neither realism nor surrealism has been his forte through the years, but the fable, the parable, the allegory, the ancient art of basic storytelling in a modern voice; through this special mode he has earned his high place in contemporary letters.

"God's Grace" is the most up-front fable he has yet written, complete with a defensive Yahweh, an ironic Moses, Jesus, talking chimps and perverse gorillas, biblical rites of sacrifice, plus, of course, the pointed moral wisdom—this time full of dark prophecy. Does the darkness emerge from the author himself growing older, facing his own end, or his living in an age of crisis, when civilization is facing its own possible end? Whichever, there are in this novel moments of lucid beauty beside moments of harrowing blackness—Eden and Apocalypse between two covers. The result is an odd, fanciful book, a mixed bag of surprise characters and enchanting emotions that sometimes jar alongside unlikely happenings and obvious artifice. In part because it emanates from authentic strains in the author's imagination, "God's Grace" yields certain main-stream Malamudian pleasures. In part because it attempts to be a prophetic allegory, it suffers as a novel from the nature and burden of that beast. (pp. 1, 14)