At first glance, God's Grace looks like an improbable novel to come from Bernard Malamud. In fact, it is an odd book, period….

The book is clearly a version of Robinson Crusoe, updated to the age of total war. Malamud has written about talking animals before—in "The Jewbird" and "Talking Horse." But those stories, like all of Malamud's best fiction, are hard as diamonds, tight and spare rather than verbose, and with no overt moralizing. In God's Grace, Malamud's sententious side takes over—even one of the chimps complains that Cohn's homilies insult his intelligence. Unlike the great fabulists, whose art is playful rather than ponderous, Malamud no longer trusts the tale to carry its own meanings. Cohn, a self-anointed prophet bursting with conventional wisdom, is constantly telling the beasts to surmount their animal qualities. Yet he does a bit of surmounting himself—of the only girl...