What strikes one first of all about Daniel Fuchs's novels and stories, especially if they're compared to the work of other "Jewish American" writers, is that Fuchs has no designs on his readers. No large thoughts, no postcards to deaf intellectuals, no theories about the future of the novel, not even grudges against relatives.

Fuchs is a pure novelist…. The traditional act of imitation, putting down a picture-in-language of how people live at a certain time, a certain place absorbs him fully and may even, he writes, yield "a sense of well-being arising from the scene and the people."

This belief in the sufficiency of rendering has hardly dominated twentieth-century writing, and it may be that a readiness to remain a "pure" novelist exacts a price, confining the work to minor possibilities. Fuchs himself is surely a minor writer, but a very good one, something pleasing in a...