Irvin Faust has earned a place in the pantheon of American authors who have attempted to blend fictive narratives into actual historical background. But unlike E. L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo, for instance, Faust customarily writes against the grain, dealing with people who exist outside the mainstream and whose lives are spent in striving to enter it. Since he is also a Jew, Faust is often lumped with writers such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, whose work concentrates on the Jewish experience. But Faust has shown himself to be concerned with a much broader segment of Americans, as seen in novels such as The File on Stanley Patton Buchta (1970), Willy Remembers (1971), and Jim Dandy (1994) as well as in many of his short stories. His writing--elliptical in style, varied in structure, freewheeling in its range, deeply evocative of human psychological aberration--exemplifies the fictive social historian at his best...