Several American-Jewish writers have used America's preoccupation with sports as the basis for their fiction; Bernard Malamud's The Natural and Philip Roth's The Great American Novel come immediately to mind. Jay Neugeboren first gained a modest readership through his sports fiction, and his accomplishments in this area are original, often elegant evocations of the subtleties of a modern phenomenon most encounter only superficially in the public arena. Neugeboren's novel about basketball, Big Man (1966), exemplifies the author's acute sensitivity to both the individual athlete's and the game's manifold complexities. Similarly, his treatment of baseball in several works transmutes the sport's legendary history, raw vitality, and essentially aesthetic form into a remarkable literary motif at once realistic and romantic. Despite his success in dealing with the literary possibilities of sports, the direction Neugeboren's writing has taken since his fourth book, Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey (1970), is toward the fictive interpretation of...