Bernard Malamud sometimes gets obscured by flashier American writers…. But he writes superbly most of the time, at least as well as any living American writer of fiction, and time will pardon him for violating the categories.

For he does do that, and reviewers, whose categories they largely are, are often uncomfortable with him because of it. His narratives, which we are told ought to be shapely and lucid, are often lopsided and indistinct. He can be abrupt, impatient with the demands of plot without being willing to scuttle plot altogether; so he'll take shortcuts. His situations sometimes fail wholly to convince on sociological grounds—The Tenants is an example—and his tense, loving, troubled appreciation of life, with its concomitant of occasional desperation, can lead him to sentimentality, an excess of willing; The Fixer suffers from that. In short, he isn't a tidy novelist, but loose and...