"Man had innumerable chances but was—in the long run—insufficient to God's purpose. He was insufficient to himself."

That theme is variously expressed in Bernard Malamud's extraordinary fable, "God's Grace,"… which manages the rare feat of being a post-nuclear-holocaust story both somber and sometimes very funny….

Weighing the ever-difficult problem of how much to disclose, I cannot conceal that the fable which, for a time, seems ebulliently hopefilled, abruptly clouds over. Aggressions more brutal than that of Cain against Abel break out. The animal world is not to be sentimentalized. Mr. Malamud, whose mood had seemed hopeful, suddenly makes it clear that if the late great human race is to have successors, they too will be fallen, they too expelled from the Garden.

I can't deny that from a highland of delight, as his reader, I found myself plunged into a chasm of depression that disappointed me...