Word: love
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DUBIN'S LIVES by Bernard Malamud is another example of the male menopause novel, a form that has become increasingly popular in recent years with such authors as Saul Bellow, John Updike and John Fowles. Men in their mid-life crisis get bored with their careers, fall out of love with their wives and in love with younger women, suddenly and unexpectedly find that they have lost control of their lives...
...road, cannot face him, hides behind a tree and lets him pass. He yearns to confide in his estranged daughter. When she finally tells him of her affair with a man even older than her father, offering Dubin a perfect opening to finally unburden himself about his love for Fanny Bick, he lets the opportunity pass. Instead he delivers a tired, paternal lecture, retreating into the mythical wisdom he supposedly possesses as a biographer intimate with the lives of the great. Even when his wife discovers his affair with Fanny and the lame excuse of "protecting" her is gone...
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...
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...
...becomes harder and harder to understand why. The problem is that the book becomes too much like Dubin--one of those people who draw you into their lives with the message, "I can change, I want to change, all I need is for you to believe in me, love me and I will change." And it ends with Dubin sneaking out the back door to Fanny and, never spending the night, sneaking back to his broken wife before dawn. Do we care...