Bernard Malamud is a writer who early on established an emphatic paradigm for his fictional world and who ever since has been struggling in a variety of ways to escape its confines. His latest novel [God's Grace] is his most strenuous strategem of escape, moving beyond the urban horizon of his formative work into an entirely new mode of postapocalyptic fantasy—with intriguing though somewhat problematic results.

When I say "paradigm," I am not referring to the explicit Jewish themes or to the morally floundering Jewish protagonists that have been trademarks of Malamud's fiction, with the exception of his first novel, The Natural. In fact, God's Grace is the most self-consciously Jewish of all his books. Its hero, Calvin (née Seymour) Cohn, the son of a rabbi and himself a former rabbinic student, carries his dog-eared copy of the Pentateuch into the strange new world in which he finds himself, tries to transfer its ethical teaching to the new reality, conducts inward arguments with God, sometimes even alluding to rabbinic texts, and, above all, broods over the awesome story of the Binding of Isaac and wonders what it might suggest about God's real intentions toward humanity. What I mean by "paradigm" is, in essence, the phenomenological substructure of Malamud's fictional world—its constant tilting of its protagonists into narrow enclosures, preferably cluttered and dirty, and ultimately with no real exits. The novelist has repeatedly sought to give his own claustrophobic sensibility a moral as well as thematic justification by intimating that these sundry traps, prisons, and living graves in which he places his protagonists (Morris Bober's grocery store, Yakov Bok's cell, Harry Lesser's condemned tenement) are the harsh limits within which a true moral life of commitment is realized. But … this is precisely the least convincing aspect of Malamud's work.

God's Grace, as a future fiction, sets to one side—without, however, entirely suppressing—the Malamudian vision of cluttered incarceration by sweeping the global slate clean…. By an absurd oversight of God—or is it, Cohn wonders, a new twist of His inscrutable design?—Cohn alone of all humanity is saved in the insulated roundness of his deep-sea submersible. Up to this point, the plot follows a familiar enough route of reasonably plausible science fiction, but by rapid stages, uninhibited fantasy takes over. Summary is bound to be a little unfair to the novel because Malamud makes it far more engaging than will be suggested by the bare fictional data….

Cohn's island might of course be construed as another version of the Malamudian prison, but it has a speciousness, a paradisiacal sense of benign nature, absent from the characteristic roach-ridden cells, literal and figurative, of Malamud's previous fiction. Even the Crusoesque cave that Cohn makes into his home, complete with rough-hewn-furniture, shelves, and a rolling wooden barrier at the mouth, is more cosy womb than tomb. This mode of fantasy, moreover, releases an element of exuberance in Malamud's writing that was exhibited in some of his most attractive early stories, like "Angel Levine" and "Idiots First." The opening chapter, in which Cohn, in his dripping wet suit, discovers that, despite the promise recorded in Genesis, the Flood has come again, and then finds himself addressed from above by an impatient Lord of Hosts, is a bravura performance. Many of the pages that follow are informed by a winning zaniness of invention. Modulations of tone are always essential when Malamud's writing is working well, and the quality of wry bemusement, hovering between sad reflection and self-ironic laughter, lends a certain emotional authority to the fantasy. (p. 38)

Malamud has described his own novel as "a visionary tale with a prophetic warning." Some of his efforts, I fear, to convey a visionary argument through the story betray an underlying weakness, and the prophetic warning at the end, though it may seem to the author to serve a moral purpose, is a painful illustration of how Malamud's materials can go wildly out of control. Let me first address the visionary argument. Given the calamitous state to which humankind has brought the world, and, if you are a believer, to which God has permitted humankind to bring the world, Malamud not only questions human nature but also the nature of the God who allows His own handiwork such a cruel genius for self-annihilation. This theological inquiry is focused chiefly through a confrontation between Jewish and Christian views (in the persons of Cohn and Buz) of the story of the Binding of Isaac, the compelling and baffling parable of how God might seem to require the slaughter of His human sons. Christian tradition calls the story the Sacrifice of Isaac because it is taken as the typological intimation of the Crucifixion; Judaism calls it the Binding because the actual denouement of the story is stressed, in which the angel's voice stays the sacrificial knife just before it plunges. Cohn is led to speculate, considering what has happened to his own century from the Holocaust through Hiroshima to the ultimate devastation, that the Lord who oversees this world might in fact want an actual immolation of humanity.

Struggling to perpetuate a humane Jewish ethics, Cohn promulgates to his fellow primates what he calls the Seven Admonitions (in deference to his Mosaic predecessor, he avoids the term commandment), which reflect a cautiously hopeful, pragmatic view of the necessity for altruism and of man's small but real potential for good. The Second Admonition reads: "Note: God is not love. God is God. Remember Him." This Jewish theological emphasis, it might be observed, reverses certain subterranean Christian motifs that can be detected in the earlier Malamud…. Late in the book, at a point when Cohn's hoped-for new covenant is manifestly disintegrating, Buz, who has played a shadowy role in the process of disintegration, makes bold to erase the word "not" from the Second Admonition. The theological assertion, thus Christianized, that God is love, might seem benign enough, but in view of what is afterward perpetrated by the hand that has revised the Admonition, an anti-Christian polemic is clearly implied. Those who make such an ideal claim about God, we may infer, are the most likely to slip into the abyss of the anti-ideal; or, alternately, a God who is supposed to be love in a world where so little of it is in evidence may also enact the outrageous paradox of sacrificing mankind, His only-begotten beloved son, in the most ghastly way to demonstrate that He is love.

Malamud's theological argument, unlike the tonality and humor of his fantasy, is not misrepresented by summary. It is, in other words, schematic, sketchy, lacking weight of experience and density of intellectual texture. One symptom of this lack of anchorage is that Cohn's abundant references to Jewish tradition are patently secondhand and in some instances misinformed. More serious is the fact that this polemic with Christianity in the end contradictorily reimagines a doctrine of Original Sin, the plot concluding with an irresistible assertion of the Old Adam. There is an ambiguity here that is confused rather than fruitful: a reader, contemplating the conclusion, could easily turn the whole book around, something I doubt the author intends, and claim that Cohn's guarded Jewish optimism about humanity was all along a superficial view and, worse, an abysmal delusion.

The denouement involves a horrific orgy of infanticide and cannibalism and then dire consequences of a rather strained symbolic character for Cohn himself. Malamud wants this to be taken as prophetic warning, but it seems far more like sheer punishment inflicted by the author on his protagonist and thus implicitly on the reader as well. Punishing his incarcerated characters has been a temptation to which Malamud has of course succumbed again and again. The feel of the ending here is unfortunately very like that of the ghastly ending of The Tenants, when Harry Lesser sinks an ax into the skull of Willie Spearmint at the exact moment his black rival lashes off his testicles with a razor-sharp knife. Even without pursuing psychoanalytic conjecture, we may note that there is a palpable gap between such unleashing of aggression against characters and readers, and the moral claims made for the fictional expression of all that rage. (pp. 38-40)

The moral message [in God's Grace] is unexceptionable, but the vehemence with which the brutish counterforce to kindness and pity is imagined at the end is disquieting. Instead of holding a prophetic mirror to the contorted face of mankind, the novelist—at least so it seems to this reader—has once again taken his lovingly fashioned creatures, bound them hand and foot, and begun to play with axes, knives, tearing incisors, and other instruments of dismemberment. (p. 40)