Most writers make bad ambassadors for their work.The world outside the page, for the writer, is almost always less alluring than the world he creates in his imagination. Why should he desert the latter, where he is always in control, for the former, where he is at the mercy of strangers? Such, at any rate, was the attitude of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who submerged himself in writing so completely that he only grudgingly came up for air. Even on vacation in Switzerland, remembered his French translator, he would insist: “We can’t see each other in the morning, because I work. Nor in the afternoon, because I work.” It is no wonder Florence Noiville titles one section of her slight new biography, “Isaac B. Singer: A Life” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $23), “An Industrial Methodology.”

The fruits of Singer’s obsessive discipline are obvious: 14 novels, 11 collections of short stories, 16 children’s books. To get a true tally of his books, in fact, you have to double this already prodigious number, since he always wrote first in Yiddish, only then translating himself into English. (For decades, he published his novels serially in the Yiddish Forward, writing to a Dickens-like schedule.) Yet the differences between the two languages were so great that, as Singer insisted, his English work has to be treated as “a second original” — shorn, as Yiddish readers have complained, of much of the elaboration and allusion that his native tongue allowed. In one of her most illuminating passages, Ms. Noiville compares the ending of the Yiddish version of the story “The Mirror” to the English version: two long paragraphs are boiled down to a few sentences.

Singer’s relentless schedule, then, was partly a result of his unique linguistic predicament. He was writing what he knew, after 1945, to be a dead language. The native speakers of Yiddish who had not been killed in the Holocaust were raising children who spoke Hebrew or English or Russian. Singer’s “second original” was the life raft on which his work would reach posterity. It was also what enabled him to win such extraordinary popularity in the United States, trading the pinched and jealous life of the literary exile for the privileges of the famous writer. Robert Giroux, his publisher for most of his American career, remembered Singer musing, “One thing I never thought would happen — I’ve become a rich man.” And that, as Giroux noted, was before Barbra Streisand played Yentl.

Yet Singer’s “bent industry,” to use the poet Derek Walcott’s phrase, also had more gnarled and private sources. To really unravel a character as complicated, and at times unlovely, as Singer’s would take a book much longer than this one, and a much better equipped biographer. Ms. Noiville, a French literary journalist, does not seem very familiar with either the Eastern European or the American cultural contexts of Singer’s work. What’s more, she depends for her biographical portrait mainly on Singer’s own memoirs and fiction, and on previously published recollections by highly interested parties — notably Singer’s estranged son, Israel Zamir, and his longtime amanuensis, Dvorah Telushkin.

In part, this scarcity of eyewitnesses is unavoidable. Singer had few real intimates, and almost everyone who could discuss the first half of his life, in pre-war Poland, is long dead.Yet the result is that Ms. Noiville paints Singer in exceedingly broad strokes, often melodramatic ones, as though he were a character in a bad novel: “Ardor, passion, pride, shame, despair. These feelings formed a complex web of emotions,” and so on.

What Ms. Noiville has really given us, then, is not “a life” but a sketch. Decades pass in a few sentences, novels are listed and forgotten.Yet “Isaac B. Singer” does give the reader a useful sense of the shape of Singer’s existence, its broad recurring patterns. The chief of these, evident long before he moved to America in 1935, is the single-mindedness with which he pursued a literary ambition that every circumstance of his life seemed designed to thwart. The world Singer was born into, in 1904, was what he called “a stronghold of Jewish puritanism.” His paternal ancestors had been rabbis for seven generations, and his father disapproved, strongly but ineffectually, of anything so frivolous as art. Once when he was a boy, Singer wrote, he swapped his Bible for a classmate’s, because it featured an engraving of Moses holding the tablets; when his father found out, he forbade him to keep it, since “it was forbidden to have such pictures in a sacred book.”

To make his way from such a childhood — traditional, impoverished, constricted — to the Nobel Prize for Literature required so much psychic energy, it seems, that Singer had none to spare for family or friendship. When he moved to America, he didn’t hesitate to leave his five-year-old son behind in Poland: “What is a son after all?” he wrote in the story “The Son.” “What makes my semen more to me than somebody else’s?” His older brother, Israel Joshua, became famous as a writer long before Singer himself, and sponsored his emigration to America. But while Singer always acknowledged his brother’s influence and help, “in his presence,” he wrote, he “remained a shy little boy,” guarded and sullen. The series of adoring women translators that flocked to Singer’s side found themselves used and discarded. The portrait Ms. Noiville draws seems to confirm Singer’s own feelings about getting to know famous writers: If he lived across the street from Tolstoy, Singer declared, he wouldn’t bother to try to meet him.

Singer’s fierce egotism, however, seems less like mere self-seeking than like a desperate effort at self-protection. To escape the gravitational fields of family, religion, tradition, and history, he needed the ruthless momentum of a rocket, which smashes its way forward at all costs. The irony, of course, is that Singer’s work was wholly devoted to those very subjects, to such a degree that he could be taken, despite himself, as a kind of mascot of the shtetl. Even his appearance — the big ears, pale skin, twinkling eyes — seemed to lend itself to the image of a kindly conjuror, friend to imps and dybbuks. In fact, as any reader of his work knows, Singer did not regard demons as quaint, folkloric conceits. Like Dostoevsky and Gogol, his truest peers, he saw that the world really is full of devils, and he made his fiction into one of the twentieth century’s most harrowing confrontations with evil. The events of his life, so briefly summarized in “Isaac B. Singer,” only make sense as the outward accompaniment to that hidden, costly, but endlessly creative struggle.