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brooding but not overly abundant or reliably melodic. One comes
repeatedly upon passages that are just plain clumsy, as though
Malamud had forgotten the syntax of English or pieced together his
own upon Yiddish syntactical patterns. He is no Bellow or Roth or
Updike with an endless fund of bright phrases at his elbow; his idiom
is a limited one that has not noticeably grown in the thirty-four years
he has been writing. He writes in what might be called basic
English, now lyrical, now stumbling, reminding us more than a little
of Isaac Babel in his regard for simple truths and his studied neglect
of ornamentation.
Within that limited budget of words, however, Malamud
achieves in his stories a
Kleine Nachtmusik,
a simple melodic
weariness that envelops his characters like a syrup.
Davidov, the Census-taker, opened the door without knocking,
limped into the room, and sat wearily down. Out came his note–
book and he was on the job. Rosen, the ex-coffee salesman,
wasted, eyes despairing, sat motionless, cross-legged, on his cot.
The square, clean but cold room, lit by a dim globe, was sparsely
furnished: the cot, a folding chair, small table, old unpainted
chests-no closets but who needed them?-and a small sink with
a rough piece of green, institutional soap on its holder-you
could smell it across the room. The worn black shade over the
single narrow window was drawn to the ledge, surprising
Davidov .
It takes us a while to comprehend that Rosen is dead and that death
is no release, just a pane of one-way glass between himself and the
living. The green institutional soap, the worn shade, the cot are the
furniture of his life and of his heart, which has all the color and
warmth of a cold-water flat. Alfred Kazin speaks of Malamud's pov–
erty as "an aesthetic medium ... coloring everything with its woebe–
gone utensils, its stubborn immigrant English, its all-circulating de–
spair." One might want to say that defeat, not just poverty, is the
enveloping medium, but Kazin's general point stands: some deple–
tion of the spirit - call it poverty, call it defeat - not only commands
the situation but choreographs every act, every speech, every word
on the page. Through seas of sadness, Malamud's characters swim
like fish.
The initial impression Malamud gave in the 1950s, with his
early stories in
The Magic Barrel
and the novels
The Natural
and
The
Assistant,
was that of being a purveyor of Jewish admonitions . The
