THE NOVEL
AGAIN
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marked "fragile." And as an expert on the matter once observed,
the Jews who people Malamud's fiction bear a very special and
indirect relation to the actual historical Jewish character. Malamud
abstracts them from their historical circumstances and treats them
poetically and mythically. The theme of
The Assistant
is equally
mythical and is
in
fact the theme of all Malamud's novels to date.
These novels are about the experience of re-birth;
in
each of them
a prematurely oldish young man, whose earlier life is cloaked in
darkness, but has included a dismal or tragic experience of failure,
is given a second chance to make something of his life and redeem
his disreputable past. In this connection the analogy between Gold–
ing's writing .and Malamud's takes an odd dialectical tum. Golding's
novels all deal with experiences of regression, disintegration, and
death, and are violent fantasies of an unregenerate world, whereas
the imaginative impulse behind Malamud's writing has attached it–
self to the idea of redemption and resurrection through suffering.
Consider: in the year 1961 a former Oxonian, officer
in
the Royal
Navy, and school-master, whose main interest outside of writing
is sailing, writes novels under the influence of
Totem and Taboo
and
Civilization and Its Discontents;
while a New York Jew discovers
Pilgrim's Progress
in a grocery store, creates Jews who are dead–
ringers for Christian saints, and finds the Chapel Perilous in Ebbetts
Field. The wonders of nature never cease.
Like Golding'S
Free Fall,
Malamud's recently published third
novel attempts to deal with areas of experience that his earlier writ–
ing avoided. In
A New Life
Malamud has undertaken to represent
the life of a provincial college community and to record its qualities
of absurdity and unreality. But he has done so almost solely by at–
tempting to register its banal actualities rather flatly most of the time,
without transfiguring them in his magical distorting-mirror. Now the
life of academic society is beyond doubt fantastic, and it is true
that the fantasy, the wildness, the astounding irreality of it spring
out of the multitude of dreary and humdrum details and duties that
constitute its daily existence: the nightmar.e of academic life is
in–
separable from its terrible ordinariness. In the past this fantasia of
the prosaic-society itself-was the meat and drink of novelists. But
in Malamud it seems precisely the commonplace, daily reality that is
elusive; his highly developed and specialized gift seems as yet unable
