“... where she hears a famous writer read one of his stories. The story is a modified version of Bernard Malamud’s ‘The Silver Crown’, about a counterfeit rabbi who extorts money out of the desperate by selling them silver crowns which, he claims, have magical powers. Malamud’s story produces in the narrator ...”

“... demands of art, though his wife, Hope, has paid at least as high a price. Lonoff is a version of Bernard Malamud, and there is another Jewish writer in the book, Felix Abravanel, who is a distillation of Bellow with a dash of Mailer. Pierpont rightly acclaims as ‘one of the most beautifully Jamesian phrases in this James-haunted book’ the ...”