[Wallant's novels] are dark visions of disquieting, often apocalyptic seriousness, haunting, desolating books about the improbable possibilities of redemption in a corrosively malignant world. Each of Wallant's books is a kind of pilgrim's progress about those blighted innocents, who damned to disbelief, keep vigil at the gate.

Wallant's prose, at its best, seems to brush across the nerve of our feelings in fragile and uncanny ways. Even in his first novel, The Human Season, the least successful of the four, there are moments of rending insight, of agonizing perception of character. (p. 138)

Like all of Wallant's heroes, Sol [the title character of The Pawnbroker], in a delicate truce with survival, has of necessity shut himself off from his feelings. He is "sick and dying yet nowhere near the ease of physical death." The novel is about the Pawnbroker's slow return from the carrion sleep of numbness to the...