Commentary on his work

 

American Mischief (1973)

  • "No novelist has written with such knowledge and eloquence of the consequences of carnal passion in Massachusetts since The Scarlet Letter."

    — Philip Roth, Esquire

  • "A report from the Ivy Lower Depths by an extraordinary new writer... It isn't just real life that has changed but imagination itself, the kinds of myths a generation wants and believes. And Mr. Lelchuk has produced a whole mythology, a book of beasts, that anatomizes the new imagination with bloodcurdling fidelity."

    — Wilfred Sheed, Book of the Month Club News

  • "American Mischief should be read as a companion piece to, if not equal of, Mr. Sammler's Planet. It is a map, charted with intelligence, lit by vitality, of America's ailments."

    — Mordecai Richler, Chicago Tribune

Miriam At Thirty-Four (1974)

  • "A drastic and original portrait of a woman running for her life, from what she was to what she might be... The best embodiment we have of the illusions, the risks, the rewards of a woman's all-out pursuit of her self."

    — The New York Times

  • "Miriam is intellectually adventurous, ever heroic in her determination to open herself to all experiences... A novel that will be loved and fought over."

    — Boston Globe

  • "Miriam, has serious intellectual ambitions and is prepared to dare... She transforms into an adventurer in the dark mode of Céline and Genet, confronting life as it is when stripped of order and ethical imperitives... Swift and clearheaded, a serious book about serious things."

    — The Atlantic

Shrinking, The Beginning of My Own Ending (1978)

  • "Brilliantly conceived and dazzlingly executed."

    — St. Louis Globe-Democrat

  • "Electrifying, inventive... the man can write."

    — Denver Rocky Mountain News

Miriam In Her Forties (1985)

  • "Mister Lelchuk is a writer of intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive. Miriam is a full-bodied portrait of a woman who lives hard in our heads... yet she lives with spirit... I expect we'll hear from her again."

    — Samuel Shem, The New York Times Book Review

  • "Miriam is not a model or an ideal, but is precisely for her individuality that we value her most. Lelchuk writes with an immense delight in images, in words, and in intransigent mortal particularity. For women who seek answers he offers ambiguity, an ambiguity that is curiously satisfying."

    — Catherine Bateson

On Home Ground (1987)

  • "On Home Ground raises contemporary questions for its young readers and does so with such skill. It achieves such a success far beyond an exercise in baseball and nostalgia."

    — The New York Times Book Review

Brooklyn Boy (1989)

  • "Lelchuk's eloquence could give the most complacent Angelino a major guilt trip. How could we have stolen away the Dodgers from the sacred shrine, that magical homeland of True Believers? With its intriguing overlapping patterns and its endearing questing hero, Lelchuk's work... enrich[es] the rich body of literature about growing up as a Brooklyn Boy."

    — Los Angeles Times

  • "A writer who does with élan what most writers harrow their souls to do: fill each page with the pure force of his being. BROOKLYN BOY is the most muted and restrained of his books... Rough-hewn and episodic as it is, BROOKLYN BOY strikes me as Lelchuk's best book."

    — Mark Schechner, The Buffalo News

  • "Mr. Lelchuk's contemporaries will be delighted with the accounting he gives of the home turf."

    — Saul Bellow

  • "Straightforward and unpretentious... rich in detail... absolutely authentic... Brooklyn is the real hero."

    — Wallace Stegner

Playing The Game (1995)

  • "Alan Lelchuk is a wild man. An implausaible inventive, passionate wild man. How do I know? I've just finished 'Playing The Game' and I've never before come upon such an original combination of good basketball writing and radical political philosophy."

    — Sam Toperoff, Newsday

  • "You won't find many books like this. PLAYING THE GAME is a sports novel, full of excitement, suspense, and deep knowledge of baskeball. It's also a work of literature, beautifully written , full of insight. Here is Lelchuk at the top of his form."

    — Noel Perrin

Searching For Wallenberg (2015)

  • “Part detective story, part philosophic inquiry, part historic revisionism, Alan Lelchuk delivers a thinking man’s thriller… ”

    — Jules Feiffer

  • “Sometimes we are better served by a novelist's imagination than by a professional historian's scholarship. Alan Lelchuk drives this argument home with a brilliantly constructed literary investigation into the mysterious life and death of Raoul Wallenberg. The strength of the fiction lies in its ambiguity: this is how it might have been--or maybe not.”

    — Michael Walzer

  • “Not knowing is the great subject of Alan Lelchuk’s remarkable novel about one man’s effort to learn to live on the border separating the known and the unknown.”

    — Thomas Powers