Word: tenants
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Looking Up. The book has the quaint fascination of an Horatio Alger tale. Walter Joseph Hickel was born at Ellinwood, Kans., in 1919, the son of a German-American tenant farmer. As a four-year-old, he scrambled to the top of the farm's windmill to get a better view of the world. Rushing to rescue Wally, his father shouted, "Keep looking up! Keep looking up!" The advice stuck...
Marion, Marcus's older sister, is the inevitable object of Leo's yearnings. At once the warmest of the Maudsleys, she also hides more mysterious secrets. While dawdling with a perfect match, the Viscount Hugh Trimmingham, she is making love to a tenant farmer, Ted Burgess. After a series of plot coincidences which seem audacious in a contemporary movie-going context, but are somewhat justified by the boy's mystic qualities, Leo becomes Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the go-between delivering letters of rendezvous from Burgess to Marion...
...slowly becomes aware of the nature of the Marion-Burgess relationship, the stocky, good-natured tenant of Black Farm assumes a father-like role. Burgess is no calloused, warted prophet of the Lawrentian school of peasants, but a strong, understanding worker. He stands in the film for the natural qualities smothered by Hall mores, but to him these are merely the elements of a commonly accessible good life. His tragedy is his inarticulateness, which causes him to lose Leo's trust before he can explain to him the meaning of adulthood...
...uncertain an affirmation as Malamud has ever written. In past stories and novels such as The Assistant, A New Life, The Fixer, suffering usually stretched a character's awareness of life's tragic limitations. In The Tenant, men hack blindly at each other's flesh, and the author labors to discern some faint compassion in the violence. Like Lesser, Malamud too has had trouble finishing his book. The difficulty is underscored by an epilogue in which Levenspiel, the landlord whom circumstance has also made a victim of the combat, sets up a liturgical cry for mercy...
...Tenant is not really a novel (or parable), but a bleak, relentless vision. It is full of that blend of realism and fantasy, comedy and pathos that distinguishes Malamud as one of America's best writers. That it does not end with a warm rush of saving compassion indicates that he is one of America's most honest writers as well. · R. Z. Sheppard