The title character of "The Goy" is a Christian cast among Jews. He takes a Jewish wife and a Jewish mistress. His scholarly, professional life depends on the favor of Jews—in a New York faculty, in a Washington population study, at the hinterland "Center" where he arrives at the beginning of the book, hoping for a place to finish his life's work.

But even here, ironically close to the Gentile roots of his boyhood hometown, he is a kind of exile. And he is haunted by the thought that he may have been guilty of anti-Semitism in an almost Biblical act of violence against his own son.

This character, Westrum, becomes not only recognizable, in the sense of those non-Jews drawn toward Jews, but almost mythical in a classic reversal of the role of the Jew trying to make the grade in a world that subtly and...