[Old Love] unfortunately makes one more conscious of [Singer's] limitations than of his achievement, and in some ways explicitly confirms the judgments … of those critics who have seen a certain falling-off in his recent work…. The weakest stories are first-person narratives in which the narrator is a thinly fictionalized version of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the plots would appear to be thinly fictionalized accounts of the author's travels and tribulations, or of his fantasies, chiefly sexual, about himself, without the imaginative weight and formal definition of realized fiction. The only stories in the volume that recall the artful poise of Singer's earlier fiction are "The Boy Knows the Truth" and "Tanhum."…

Another objection to Singer's recent writing substantiated by this collection is that his work has become, as Seymour Kleinberg put it in a review of "A Crown of Feathers" [see CLC, Vol. 3], increasingly "private, idiosyncratic and self-indulgent." There is a peculiar violence of imagination in Singer that in these recent stories seems to break through the narrative surface like the unmediated expression of an obsession, without the artistic distancing provided by the folkloric vehicles of his more traditional tales.

Despite the title of the new collection, the stories are for the most part about lust, not love, and a recurrent sequence of associations links concupiscence with some form of perversion or mental derangement … and then inflicts on the lustful parties some hideous variety of violence…. It is as though Singer the voluptuary and Singer the guilt-ridden moralist were allowed to collide repeatedly in these fictions without much governing artistic direction. (p. 26)

Singer has often been described as a modernist working with traditional materials, but modernism assumes complexity as a supreme value, both in the formal shaping of the literary work and in the realms of psychology and moral experience with which it deals. Singer, on the other hand, is a simple writer, both formally and thematically; and I think he is at his best when he consciously or intuitively takes advantage of this fact….

[For] all that has been said about Singer's greatness as a storyteller, what chiefly engages us in [the] most striking of his fictions is not the tale told since the plots themselves are secondary and sometimes sketchy or contrived, but rather the performance of the teller, the sure pacing, the wit, the vigor, the timbre of the narrating voice. Singer's vivid fictions of a vanished Polish Jewry are in a sense brilliant acts of ventriloquism. (p. 28)