Word: malamud
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...never lacked for critics eager to consign him to the minors. His career began during the heyday of brilliant U.S. Jewish writing. Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, among others, were the critics' darlings. A sensitive outsider from the sticks did not measure up to prevailing standards. In Commentary, Norman Podhoretz complained, "His short stories ... strike me as all windup and no delivery." Bruised by appraisals like this, Updike eventually turned his hurt feelings to good use: "Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also...
...Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot observed. Evidently, neither can many prominent novelists. An increasing number are now in flight from the everyday world they used to chronicle. In his latest novel, God's Grace, Bernard Malamud conceived of a latter-day Noah, adrift on an ark. Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor...
...gorilla mouthing the prayer for the dead over a human being? Malamud, who once called for fiction "filled with love, beauty and hope," has now written a novel filled with death, bestiality and despair. Why has he called it God's Grace?Even in fiction, his grace must mean more than man's disgrace. -By Patricia Blake
...more than 20 years, Bernard Malamud has been talking like a novelist engagé. Much of his fiction has explored Jewish "ethicality," which he defines as "how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living." In 1958, the year he published his National Book Award-winning stories, The Magic Barrel, he said, quoting Albert Camus: "The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." He has deplored the self-devaluation of modern man that springs from his having invented the means of his own extinction. It is no surprise, then, that his eighth...
...What Malamud has actually produced is an astonishment: a fable of the last man so bizarre that it defies explication. At first it seems that in the person of Calvin Cohn, the author has in mind a latter-day Noah. Adrift in a boat Cohn is the only human survivor of the "Second Flood" that follows a nuclear war between the "Djanks" and "Druzhkies." Speaking from a crack in the sky, God addresses Cohn: "That you went on living, Mr. Cohn, I regret to say, was no more than a marginal error. . . Therefore live quickly-a few deep breaths...