Bernard Malamud's risk-taking new novel ["Dubin's Lives"] moves into areas not usually associated with his art. In many of the famous short stories, in such novels as "The Assistant," "The Fixer" and "The Tenants," Malamud has depicted Jewish characters in confrontation with their neighbors—Italian-Americans, Czarist Russians, blacks and other goyim; he has presented the Jew as victim, as sufferer and as purveyor of special moral insights painfully wrung from experience. Often his stories have seemed like fables; often he has used, in both narrative and dialogue, a voice that echoes, in its rhythms and locutions, the Yiddish-speaking past.

"Dubin's Lives," by contrast, is only peripherally concerned with Jewishness, though its protagonist, William Dubin, was born into a poor Jewish family…. At 56, Dubin is a successful freelance biographer who lives comfortably in a small town, Center Campobello, on the New York-Vermont border. (p. 1)

Throughout, Dubin's relationship to his...