God's Novel

By Stefan Kanfer

OLD LOVE by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux 273 pages; $10.95

Last year the Swedish Academy had difficulty qualifying the works of the Nobel laureate for literature. Isaac Bashevis Singer's "apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy," it wrote hesitantly, "has created a microcosm, or rather a well-populated microchaos."

In his 30th book, .Singer corrects the citation. His fantasy is definitively inexhaustible. As for the microchaos, it is neither micro nor chaotic. It is as large and mysteriously ordered as the universe he ponders or the Polish village and villagers he knows by heart. No one familiar with Singer could fail to recognize his songs. Here again are the doomed Jews of the shtetl and the voluble retirees of Miami's gelt coast, the pious simpletons and the demons who can possess even the innocent spirit.

Yet there is a difference. These 18 stories are informed with a sharp apprehension of age. "Literature has neglected the old and their emotions," Singer concludes.

"The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience." Singer is not referring to the warmth of the family or the affection of the blessed for those less fortunate. He is talking about sex. Well he might. At 75, the author shows no diminution of passion or of his celebrated capacity for fusing the erotic with the grotesque.

In South America, the ubiquitous narrator makes love to a madwoman while slapping ferociously at mosquitoes "whose blood had been our blood only an instant before." One night in Israel, he hides naked on an apartment-house roof, like a character in a French farce, as a jealous husband prowls below. When he falls asleep he finds himself in a graveyard, playing with children long dead. In third-person tales, a homosexual's latent yearning for a woman leads to two murders and a suicide. In others, a rabbi contends with imps, demons, dybbuks and harpies; a woman sins with a fish and her child grows scales and fins; a eunuch tells of the daughters of Lilith who "fly around at night like bats and tempt men to commit abominations."

Singer has never had greater command of his material. At times he is the Jewish Somerset Maugham, spinning yarns of jealousy and violence with the detached tone of a narrator who just happened to be on the scene when the gun went off. At other instances he is a Kafkaesque master of the parable. At still others he is as comic and trenchant as Saul Bellow: a pretentious artist declares, "I must create. This is a physical need with me." A writer who consents to meet with a wealthy vulgarian is enticed with promises: "In the other world, a huge portion of the leviathan and a Platonic affair with Sarah, daughter of Tovim. On this lousy planet, he's liable to sell you a condominium at half price."

If the new and the youthful are excluded from Old Love, it is because the au thor knows that through his wrinkled courtiers and faded coquettes he can show the entire range of human suffering and enlightenment, from birth to the grave -- and, sometimes, beyond. If the tales sometimes seem melodramatic, too filled with coincidence or emotional trauma, well, so is the world they reflect. To Isaac Bashevis Singer, that arena is yet another story, a narrative he calls "God's novel." Its plot, he says, may be "inconsistent, sensational, antisocial, cryptic, decadent, vulgar." But, he admits, it "has suspense. One keeps reading it day and night." God knows, one could say the same of Singer's work. --Stefan Kanfer

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