["Teibele and Her Demon"] is subtitled "A Fable," and I confess that the moment I encounter the word "fable" my heart quails, for in my experience it nearly always means that we are being asked to treat a work more gently and with less critical skepticism than we would normally feel inclined to do…. I found the Singer-Friedman fable highly unsatisfactory…. Like Nabokov, Mr. Singer is a master of literary sleight of hand, and, like Nabokov, he is in jeopardy on a stage, where the sleight of hand is physical as well as literary, and subject to a constant, intense scrutiny….

Brendan Gill, "Love in the Dark," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LX, No. 46, December 31, 1979, p. 47.