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to the muted, drab world of the Depression as remembered two decades
later." For Fiedler, "the denial of the marvellous" seems to be the gravest
of apostasies, a dereliction of one's duty to be Gothic. But as I see it, the
"marvellous" requires of its user the rarest of talents. The mode of it
established by one writer seldom survives imitation by another (consider
the fate of Kafka's imitators ) . And the presence of standardized Gothic
equipment in a novel-for example the secret staircases and come-alive
portraits in Hawthorne-often substitutes for true literary invention. In
any case, so irrelevant are Gothic fancies to Malamud's sturdy characters,
so little can they afford the luxury of a "lovely, absurd madness," that
they are easily imagined as retorting: "So what's lovely about madness
that we should play Ophelia?"
All this by way not so much of quizzing Mr. Fiedler, who has his
better moments, but of trying to define Malamud, especially his dif–
ferences from the "Gothic" or "wacky" strain in contemporary novels
from
Catch
22 to
Naked Lunch
to
V.
The differences are notable and
tend to align Malamud with such a writer as
J.
F. Powers rather than
with most of the Jewish novelists of today to whom he is generally
compared. Like
J.
F. Powers, Malamud is a mildly conservative force
in writing at present, a fact which he, like Powers, perhaps owes in part
to his interest in the short story, with its necessary economy and-in the
old-fashioned parlance--its highly "conscious art." Not for Powers or
Malamud, in any case, those specialities of the modern Gothic, or wacky
novel: the "sick" hero, the stateless setting, the general effect of
im–
provised narrative, the marathon sentence which, in its attempt to
deliver instantaneously a total physical experience, leaves the reader
feeling as if he had been frisked all over by a peculiarly assiduous cop.
For the people of Malamud and Powers, Bellevue is out of bounds; they
are not
that
sick. Moreover, a distinct localism rules their choice of set–
tings ; even when foreign, they are never stateless in the sense given to
that word by Mary McCarthy in her account of
Naked Lunch.
In ad–
dition, neat patterns are traced on the reader's mind by the movement
of the "story lines" of a Malamud or a Powers narrative; there is no
effect of improvisation. And their prose avails itself of the special
authority, so beautifully exploited
by
the early Joyce, that is inherent
in the short declarative sentence. Norman Podhoretz has noted Mala–
mud's genius for getting the maximum authenticity from the maximum
economy of such a statement as, "And there were days when he was
sick to death of everything." Here are familiar words and a familiar
rhythm for one who is "sick," presumably, in the sadly familiar way of
hard-pressed people.
