The American Century: Literature since 1945 577novel, is about an Italian-American called Frank Alpine who becomes an assistant to
a New York Jewish shopkeeper. His third, A New Life (1961), tells the tale of a Jewish
professor of English who goes to teach in an Oregon “cow college.” Among his later
novels, The Fixer (1967), based on actual events that occurred in 1913, describes how
a Russian Jew is falsely accused of and imprisoned for murder. Pictures of Fidelman
(1969) tells of a middle-aged Bronx resident who goes to Italy to be an artist; Dubin’s
Lives (1974) is about the marriage and love affairs of a famous author; God’s Grace
(1982) is a pseudo-biblical tale about a man who is the sole survivor of a nuclear war
and begins a new civilization among apes. Some of the novels are comic or satirical,
others sadder, wrier, or more intensely serious. All, however, are parables: fables that
are, on one level, dense with historical specificity and personal detail and, on another,
placeless, timeless. And what these fables narrate is a painful progress from immatu-
rity to maturity, the process by which an individual can truly become a hero by
entering into the lives of others – and, quite often, manages to do so.
Each of Malamud’s stories tends to begin with the hero traveling somewhere in
quest of a new life. He is, to begin with, equipped with distinct personal abilities of
some kind – on the pitch, say, in the shop, in the classroom or the studio – but he has
no faith in anything except the urgency of his appetites. Gradually, though, he learns
that to be born as a real human being, a real hero, is to be born into history. Everything
else fades before the experienced fact of involuntary involvement in the lives of other
people. This discovery is either preceded or accompanied by a ritual slaying or
replacing or dispossessing of a symbolic father figure of fading powers – never an
actual parent. In turn, the promise of a coming of age is signaled by the fact that the
protagonist has to decide whether or not to assume the symbolic role of father.
He has, in effect, to show his awareness and acceptance of his responsibilities as a
human being by agreeing to be the father, in name or office, of children not his own.
If he fails or refuses this test, then his suffering has been for nothing, his life has no
meaning; like the hero of The Natural, he is really no hero at all. If he accepts his
burden, however, the role of father, then he finds his true freedom: which is not
gratification of self, but service to others. “It came to her that he had changed,”
a character observes of Frank Alpine, after he has accepted just such a burden toward
the end of The Assistant. “It’s true, he’s not the same man,” she says to herself. “It was
a strange thing about people – they could look the same and be different. He had
been one thing, low, dirty, but because of something in himself ... he had changed
into somebody else.” Hovering between realism and wry fable, history and parable,
Malamud’s fiction takes the measure of this “strange thing,” this process of
transformation whereby a man can become “no longer what he had been.” “If I must
suffer let it be for something,” the protagonist of The Fixer decides. With just such an
act of choice, his heroes enter into a genuinely new life. Suffering is inevitable for
them, it seems; it is their uninvited, unavoidable history; it is what they do with their
suffering that counts.
“It’s obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller
than it once was,” Saul Bellow (1915–2005) once wrote, “and this diminution
powerfully concerns those who value experience.” “I do not believe that humanGGray_c05.indd 577ray_c 05 .indd 577 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM