Herbert Gold, a novelist, who wrote of the complexities of love and marriage, died on Nov. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 99.

Mr. Gold’s writing brought a sense of humor to his tales of ordinary men and women trying to gain a foothold in the slippery terrain of romance or, like him, struggling to connect the world of their Jewish immigrant parents with the realities of American life.

His most admired novels addressed a different theme: Jewish identity in the United States. He explored this subject in two works that blended memoir and fiction, and in a novel-memoir that tilted more strongly toward autobiography.