Without being a literary theoretician, or ever wishing to, Isaac Bashevis Singer has found himself embroiled in various controversies concerning the aims of fiction. He is, for instance, aesthetically at odds with those fictionists who feel the urge to impart an "important" social, political, or philosophical message in their work. As he has said, "The moment something becomes an '-ism' it is already false."

More importantly, perhaps, his commitment to character, plot, clarity, to as Henry Miller said, "returning literature to life," has informed all his fiction from Satan in Goray and his first major novel The Family Moskat, to his recent collection of stories Old Love, and dramatizes one of contemporary fiction's central debates which is being rather furiously waged in universities and journals across the country. Summed up briefly, we have those writers (and the critics sympathetic to them) who constitute the so-called avant-garde and essentially...