n8
JOHN
HOLLANDER
Life has, of course, happened, and the "new life" of the title can
now
be
known to dawn only in the heart. But at the beginning of the
story, the West does indeed appear to be a
Morgenland
of renewal, just
as, traditionally, spaciousness of scene seems to mean Possibility. As we
first see it, the new life is an innocently modest version of the American
Dream. Levin has come west from high-school teaching and personal
despair in New York to what he hopes will
be
the first of the steps
to a Parnassus of worth and accomplishment. Levin is not the typical,
sophisticated exile from the Eastern graduate school who, to use an
analogy from the world of Mr. Malamud's first novel, is being farmed
out to a minor-league ball-club after serving as a bat-boy in the majors.
He
is
uniquely capable of accepting the drudgery of four sections of
freshman composition, the tears of co-eds and the parochial inanities
of English Department politics with something more than passive toler–
ance. From this viewpoint, Mr. Malamud has been able to write what
is among other things the best academic novel so far. Minor bureaucratic
types, using the Academy as an alternative to either a Cloth to which no
calling has come or a Management which seems to threaten, are reverent–
ly portrayed. Levin's sincerity and
engagement
throughout his attempt
to keep faith with The Word by championing better textbooks and
eventually running,
in
a mad way, for the chairmanship of his depart–
ment, enable the author to treat what Dr. Johnson would have called
the difference in size between a flea and a gnat without the cruelty of
distant observation. Even though he is fired at the end of the year,
Levin manages to institute some reforms.
But these can constitute no victory for him. Mr. Malamud never
divides his hero's private world of love from a public one of affairs and
decisions: Levin
is
by no means a C. P. Snow-bound man with
troubles
at home but
problems
to be faced around a conference table. His love
affair with Pauline Gilley, the wife of a colleague, connects the realms
of school and bed just as it helps to pour the pain of the old life into
the shining cup of the new. It is only after that cup has been dissolved
by its very contents that Levin can set out on what is truly a pioneering
journey, his old Hudson sedan laden with impediments and respon–
sibilities sexually incurred. This journey can finally move traditionally
westward, at least in the sense that it rides heavily and dreamlessly, on
creaking wheels, toward an unreceding future .
Admirers of Mr. Malamud's previous fiction will be interested in
some new facets of his work which emerge in
A New Life.
The first of
these
is
his splendid writing about sex. Ours is a time in which the
description of lovemaking has become a literary convention, when "hot
