Author of four novels, two collections of short stories, a book of satiric essays, and many articles, Bruce Jay Friedman gained recognition in the 1960s as a seriocomic writer. Labeled a black humorist, an ambiguous term he himself coined, Friedman caricatures the lives of neurotic, partially assimilated Jewish-Americans. Unlike Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, he avoids the immigrant experience and Yiddish heritage, concentrating instead on a transient, impersonal, highly materialistic America.

Although some of Friedman's short-story characters are Gentiles, his novels center on Jews alienated from Christian America and ignorant of their own roots. Shallow and status-conscious, his Jews are born losers, comic exaggerations of the victim and the bungler. Episodically structured and very colloquial, Friedman's fiction depicts an absurd and fragmented America. In such a world, the individual is weakened; the family is perverted; and the once taboo--adultery, alcoholism, drug abuse, and random violence--becomes common.

To some...