BOOKS
SAD MUSIC
THE STORIES OF BERNARD MALAMUD. By Bernard Malamud.
Far·
rar, Straus
&
Giroux. $17.95.
Any doubts we may have had about Bernard Malamud's
stature as a modern master should be dispelled by this collection of
his stories. This personal selection of twenty-five stories presents
Malamud at his best - as a writer of eloquent and poignant vignettes.
Though Malamud has published seven novels, each one touched
with his distinctive laconic grace, the short story remains the purest
distillation of his abiding leitmotif: the still, sad music of humanity .
Typically, the Malamud story is an epiphany of disappointment and
failure, a document of the half-life - the shabby region of mediocre
existence just a notch above pure disaster- bathed in the melodies of
despair, in the taut, concise adagios of woe. By and large, however,
Malamud's range of characters and situations has been too narrow
to sustain longer constructions . Lacking variety and any feel for the
architecture of sustained fiction, his novels hold the note of sorrow
too long, until what had begun as a lamentation ends as a
kvetch.
But
in the short story, Malamud achieves an almost psalmlike compres–
sion. He has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as
well be thought aJewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and
nocturnes.
The Malamud character is one we've long since come to
recognize: the underground man transposed into a small merchant
or retiree or pensioner. He is commonly alone, or beset by family,
creditors, or customers (he seldom has friends). He runs a grocery, a
deli, a candy store where the cash register is always empty and the
accounts receivable book full. His sons, if he has sons, avoid him; his
daughters, like Lear's, are ungrateful, and there is no Cordelia to
love him in spite of himself. He may have a heart condition, like
Mendel in "Idiot's First," or Marcus the tailor in "The Death of Me,"
or Mr. Panessa in "The Loan," or he may take his own life, like
Rosen the ex-coffee salesman in "Take Pity," or Oskar Gassner in
"The Jewish Refugee." At his most wretched he is a Jewbird, black
as a caftan, fishy as a herring, and cursed/blessed with the powers of
flight, though he longs only for the comforts of a home. With few ex–
ceptions, he is miserable, without hope, and waiting for death. In-
