Burdened with the same protagonists and the same unvital prose as The Chosen, The Promise suffers from the same faults, primarily Mr. Potok's utter pretentiousness, which makes his work pseudo-literary rather than literary. The artificiality is apparent in several aspects of the work.

First there is the monochromed, mono-rhythmed rhetoric, which gives a dubious unity to the novel…. The book is also burdened with a purposeless running literary allusion from Joyce's Ulysses ("Molly Bloom big with seed"), and festooned with fancy epigraphs from Pascal, Kafka, Joyce, the Midrash and the Rebbe of Kotzk. In addition, events are journalistically summarized rather than recreated…. Conversations generally have a stilted edge; people sound as if they were reading at each other rather than talking naturally….

Crowning all this is the irritating pseudo-Hemingway style, which assumes that half a dozen phrases scotch-taped by "ands" magically become poetry…. What Mr. Potok does not...