Since her first story was published in 1986, critics have hailed Allegra Goodman as a young virtuoso storyteller. Some scholars identify her often satirically realistic portraits of observant Jews as part of an important new movement in Jewish-American literature. Young authors at the fore of this movement depict religious rituals seriously and sympathetically, instead of breaking from them in a manner more characteristic of writers from a previous generation, from Philip Roth to Norman Mailer (or, more recently, Ehud Havazelet). Other readers both inside and outside Jewish communities applaud Goodman's flair for capturing the shifting identities and overbooked schedules of late-twentieth-century Americans. Whether her stories are set at a makeshift synagogue in Hawaii or a remote college in western Minnesota, skull caps (kipot) and prayer books (sidur) coexist with airport wheelchairs, vibrating motel beds, and kosher bagel dogs. The characters in Goodman's two collections of short fiction often seem...