Word: malamud
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...LIFE (367 pp.)-Bernard Malamud-Farrar, Sfraus & Cudahy...
Tender Qualities. In his previous novels (The Natural, The Assistant), Author Bernard Malamud, 47, wrote allegories that had the convincing bite of realism. Though there has never been a home run king like The Natural's Outfielder Roy Hobbs, his tragicomic baseball adventures seem as authentic as Mantle and Maris. Though The Assistant's lyrical delicatessen world cannot be found anywhere in Brooklyn, the painful journey toward redemption of ex-Thief Frank Alpine rings universally true. In contrast, A New Life is written primarily in realistic terms, and in those terms it often fails. Cascadia State is obviously...
...Malamud remains as expert as before in his persuasive alternations of farce and sadness, the tender Chekhovian qualities that have marked all his work. His hero, Levin, is a born victim of circumstance: if he holds a baby on his lap, it wets him; if he holds a class spellbound, it is only because his fly is open. He is a man with a rage for justice, and an inner compulsion to keep "on paying for being alive." But in all his straining leaps toward the highest goals, he is scarcely capable of getting his two left feet...
...Bernard Malamud, whose collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1959, will direct an advanced course in fiction writing. No limit for enrollment in the course has yet been established...
...until, at story's end, an idea is seen at the periphery of his mind, the more horrifying because it has been so thoroughly excluded from his conscious thoughts. It is the idea of suicide. Another story whose effect lingers after the pages have been turned is Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel, an understated, poignant account of a Jewish marriage broker, his errant daughter, and a wife-seeking young rabbi...