Irwin Shaw confronts the … problems of wealth and freedom, in a novel which represents a welcome return to form after the blustering machismo of The Top of the Hill. Bread Upon the Waters offers both a richly realised account of life in contemporary New York, and a real sense of engagement with moral theme. Allen Strand, its hero, is a middle-aged history teacher whose strenuous work in a tough urban secondary school is relieved by an idyllically happy home life. One evening, as the family sits down to dinner, his youngest daughter brings in a bleeding man whom she has rescued from muggers in Central Park.

In the best fairytale manner, the battered stranger proves to be an immensely rich and powerful lawyer, who proceeds to lavish the ambiguous benefits of his fairy gold upon the docile Strands. So traditional a motif tempts one to expect cliché. Money corrupts. Money cannot buy happiness. Money is never given in a disinterested way. The distinction of Bread Upon the Waters is that it first arouses and then subverts these conventional expectations.

Money proves to be less a corrosive than a catalyst, accelerating discoveries which had always been inevitable. Strand's idyll is found to have been a carefully contrived illusion, and mutability rather than filthy lucre emerges as the enemy of happiness. The book ends with a sombre vision of its hero, alone again, rededicating himself in cold and darkness to the endless struggle for meaning. Bread cast upon the waters, whether in the form of money, love or teaching, has persistently failed to be found again. Strand goes right on pitching. (p. 21)