Throughout his career Malamud has defined himself as an experimental writer. "I [always] wanted to see what I could do," he summarized his attitude to taking literary risks. "I felt that the nature of talent is difficult to define and that one way of trying to define it is to see what it can do." In the past he has jumped from writing about a baseball prodigy, a black militant, a czarist Jew, an Italian hoodlum, a talking bird, an angel, a libidinous college professor, and other equally colorful characters. He has experimented stylistically with everything from impressionist imagism, stream-ofconsciousness, to almost scientific prose.

Indeed, such consistent striving to move beyond what he has already accomplished in style and subject matter must be considered one of Malamud's hallmarks.

If it is true that the author has been taking chances all his creative life, in God's Grace he is...