BOO KS
307
THE OLD COUNTRY
THE FIXER. By Bernard Malamud. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $5.75.
The Fixer
seems to me a strikingly uneven book. At its best
it does manage to impart a sense of foreboding, it doeS" contain passages
of a despairing claustrophobic intensity, which one feels to be a true
expression of the moral and historical burden of the novel. But these
effects are achieved only at intervals; and when
The Fixer
is not at a
high level it falls to a disappointingly low one: it is clumsy in technique
and uncertain in tone. Moreover, the faults of the book are not of a
kind which one can easily set aside as one reads.
I assume that there are very few readers who do not know by now
that the novel describes the arrest and imprisonment of a Jewish handy–
man, Yakov Bok, on suspicion of having murdered a Gentile boy for
ritual purposes, in the town of Kiev shortly before World War
1.
The
book is based on the notorious Beiliss "blood libel" affair, some of the
factual detailS" of which it follows fairly closely. But
The Fixer
is wholly
intended to be read as a novel, as a work of the imagination. The
sudden, total destruction of Yakov's hopes of living as a man entitled
to make his own choices (even the choice as to whether or not he
should be a Jew); his solitary confinement within the few square feet
of a bare, damp, stinking cell; his incredulity at the nature of the charge
laid against him; his despair of being able to find any explanation for
or meaning in hiS" sufferings; his hallucinations and moments of frenzy;
his stubborn, inarticulate refusal to "confess" and thus to betray himself
and incriminate his people: all these are rendered from within, often
with great power and immediacy. Throughout the book, which covers a
period of more than two years, we are shown only what takes place in
Yakov's presence or inside his skull ; and once he has been arrested, this
close, unrelenting constriction of view affects the reader as in itself a
type of imprisonment, a paradigm of the actual subject of the book. (1
would add that the fact that Yakov is often so close to being driven out
of his mind enables Malamud to make a dramatically appropriate use
of hiS" gift for fantasy and abstraction.) The trouble is, however, that the
congruity between the narrative form and this particular theme is radi–
cally at odds with Malamud's evident ambition to make us feel within
the novel the movement and power of the vast stream of modern his-
