How often is it that a major contemporary novelist opens his latest book with a dialogue between God and man? Or employs for his main characters one human being and a chimp, with an assortment of gorillas and baboons for other dramatis personae? Or seeks to conceive a fable for the future—man after the nuclear "Devastation"—that is nothing less than a retelling of the Old and New Testaments, complete with the author's views on man's (and God's) nature, good and evil, cause and effect, fall from grace? Odd stuff for a novel, no doubt. Yet these are the materials of Bernard Malamud's latest book, "God's Grace," a fable by turns charming and foolish, topical and farfetched, provocative and innocent.

Certain questions immediately strike the reader. Is the boldness of the attempt at neobiblical wisdom and prophecy paid for at too high an artistic price? Are there...