Gina Berriault is able, with a few pen strokes, to create remarkable character portraits and dramatic situations. Her fiction looms large because she follows in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Russian writers Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevski, and Anton Chekhov, all of whom she admires and respects. She joins them, especially Dostoyevski, in probing the human psyche and finding, as she says in her novel The Lights of Earth (1984), a need to "dispel a little of the vast abandonment the world casts on everyone's face." She is a philosophical writer, sometimes existential, having read and brooded over the works of Miguel de Unamuno, Pablo Neruda, and José Ortega y Gasset, whose quotations are often cited in her books of short stories. She was also influenced by the French existentialist Albert Camus and by Italo Svevo and Samuel Beckett. Berriault has received kudos from writers and critics because of...