[Old Love] unfortunately makes one more conscious of [Singer's] limitations than of his achievement, and in some ways explicitly confirms the judgments … of those critics who have seen a certain falling-off in his recent work…. The weakest stories are first-person narratives in which the narrator is a thinly fictionalized version of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the plots would appear to be thinly fictionalized accounts of the author's travels and tribulations, or of his fantasies, chiefly sexual, about himself, without the imaginative weight and formal definition of realized fiction. The only stories in the volume that recall the artful poise of Singer's earlier fiction are "The Boy Knows the Truth" and "Tanhum."…

Another objection to Singer's recent writing substantiated by this collection is that his work has become, as Seymour Kleinberg put it in a review of "A Crown of Feathers" [see CLC, Vol. 3], increasingly "private, idiosyncratic and self-indulgent...