MILLICENT BELL
Fiction Chronicle
THE COMPLETE STORIES. By Bernard Malamud.
Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
$35.00.
THE PUTTERMESSER PAPERS. By Cynthia Ozick.
Alfi-ed A.
Knopf.
$32.00.
A CYNTHIA OZICK READER. Edited by Elaine M. Kauvar .
Indiana University Press.
$39.95.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON. By Norman
Mailer.
Random House.
$22 .()O.
THE OLD RELIGION. By David Mamet.
The Free Press.
$24 .00.
In
1954,
this magazine published "The Magic Barrel ," which was an imme–
diate sensation. One previous story of 13ernard Malamud's had appeared in
these pages and a few others elsewhe re, but he was mostly known as the
author of
The Natural,
a first novel that gave no hint of the vision and voice
he had begun to use in short fiction . When, thirty years later, Robert
Redford appeared on movie screens as Malamud's sl ugger, Roy Hobbes, the
novelist was pleased that the film (a lthough it had happy-ended his story)
gave notice that he had not been merely a "Jewish writer." He had always
been interested in wr iting "for all men," he said.
The Natllral
had success–
fully evoked the most American of myths as expressed by our national
sport. But the novel had not, in doing this, cas t a single character as a Jew–
a false start for Malamud whose Jewishness was the ground water of hi s
imagination. Hi s second novel,
The Assistallt,
now thought to be his best,
taps directly into his own early memories. It has a hero w ho resembles
Malamud's father, an immigrant grocer str uggling to survive in New York
during the ])epression. And the short stories he had begun wri ting derive
from early observation of the Jews wi thout money he had known in his
boyhood, especially small shopkeepers or craftsmen who lived isolated lives
amidst the alien corn, bereft of a lost
shtetl
world. Criti cs compared
Malamud to Chekhov, Hemingway, and Joyce as wel l as to Isaac Bashevis
Singer, the Yiddish teacher fi-olll whom he had learned how to make a tale
both vernacular and universal. "The Magic Barrel" is the title story of hi s
first co ll ection of tales, a National Book Award winner.
It portrays the anguish of Leo Finkle, a poor Rabbinical student who
goes to a marriage broker
to
find a bride and falls in love, perhaps by the
