[With] 10 of his 11 novels having appeared on the best-seller list, and with his new novel, Bread Upon the Waters, headed there in the fall …, Irwin Shaw has come to represent big bucks and bad books.

The unexamined consensus among the quality controllers of American literature is that Shaw was an exceptionally gifted short-story writer who published a promising first novel and then betrayed his promise. According to the official line, with his laconically pointed dialogue, his controlled tough-guy lyricism, and his anti-rhetorical skepticism, he could have been the heir to Hemingway. Instead, by turning increasingly to beautiful-people potboilers, full of sex and violence, set against the cardboard backdrops of Hollywood and Cannes, he did little more than provide source material for TV mini-series…. Ten pages into one of his novels and you can hear the cameras dollying in.

And yet Bread Upon the Waters, with its unadorned moral...