BOOKS
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scenes" are almost mandatory in fiction with any pretensions to serious–
ness, and when there can occur the paradox of a novelist like Wright
Morris, who writes all the more intensely, apparently, about the war
between men and women by avoiding specificity in sexual description.
It is thus reassuring to the spirit of literary realism to find Mr. Malamud
using encounters in and out of bed so effectively and convincingly.
Levin's women in the book include a co-ed with whom he has a dream–
like, unreal weekend, a wonderfully funny pseudo-picaresque encounter
with a waitress, in a barn, and, finally, the reality of his complicated
and protracted affair with Pauline.
Another interesting question raised by his third novel is Mr. Mala–
mud's treatment of Levin's Jewishness, which, in the reasonable air of
North-western democracy, practically vanishes. He is thought of by
everyone else in the book as an Easterner only. Even the glimpse we
have of his family background shows us something different from any
of the typical modes of Jewish life in America. Only at the end of the
book does Pauline reveal to him that the crystallization of her love for
him was catalyzed by his resemblance to a Jewish boy she had once
known. Here again, it is almost as if the author were reacting against
something more than the direction of his own earlier work, against a
budding convention which has led to the trotting-out of even the most
assimilated of Jewish middle-class backgrounds as a treasure-trove of
Experience in college creative-writing courses. The character of Levin
poses its author some problems, and while he has not gone so far with
an uneasily-willed
persona
as Saul Bellow with Henderson or Norman
Mailer with O'Shaughnessy, there seem to be some inconsistencies of
identification and fictional distance between Mr. Malamud and his
protagonist.
ANew Life
may, however, represent Mr. Malamud's attempt to
break out of a limited, almost regional area of performance in which,
like such different writers as Flannery O'Connor and
J.
F. Powers, he
has been most successful. One may have to have been an academic
to like his latest novel as much as I did; I hope not. But its new version
of an old ' American pastoral encounter redeems it from the provinces
of any smaller genre. It is a unique kind of book, and for its author's
future work, it promises excellent results.
John Hollander
