Word: dubin
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...William Dubin is such a man. A biographer, he has taken on a study of D.H. Lawrence and is having great difficulty fathoming the man. Lawrence's character is alien to Dubin, and the task becomes an uncomfortable wrestling match, paralleling Dubin's own struggles with his sexuality, his darker side...
...Dubin falls in love with Fanny Bick, a semi-flower child and college dropout. He is fifty-seven; she is twenty-two. It takes him 200 pages to get around to making love to her. They love each other, passionately, but Dubin cannot let go of his wife, of his ordered life. Malamud's descriptions of a middle-aged marriage-gone-sour are minutely detailed, embarassing in their intimacy and immediacy...
...novel is full of descriptive passages of up-state winters, seasonal changes which echo emotional changes in Dubin. Long desolate winters filled with blizzards and despair are followed by short ecstatic springs filled with hope, and reunions with Fanny...
Other dichotomies haunt Dubin's life. He is Jewish; his wife is a WASP. He is a city boy transplanted to the country, middle-aged and in love with youth, an orderly soul fighting chaos. The novel is one long standoff between these competing forces, and in the end there is no resolution...
...BEGINS HOPEFULLY, the bare, carefully-crafted prose interspersed with a Yiddish irony that lightens its mood. Dubin's wife Kitty has a compulsion to smell the gas burners on the stove to make sure they are not leaking. Once she leaves the house without performing the ritual: "Kitty hastily reentered the house, hurried into the kitchen, fighting herself. Herself...