Although many of the short stories (and The Fixer) are structured on the model of the Yiddish folktale, most of Malamud's longer fiction is based on non-Jewish archetypes: The Natural is the grail legend imposed upon the myths of baseball; The Assistant is a modern-day life of St. Francis of Assisi; A New Life is a travesty of the pastoral romance; and Pictures of Fidelman is a neo-Jamesian view of American innocence abroad. Seen from either the Jewish or the mythic perspective, the Malamudian hero, victimized to the end, learns to cast off the prison of self and reaches out to share the suffering of at least one other human being. While Malamud does not have the intellectual range of Bellow or command of Roth's verbal pyrotechnics, his moral vision reaches depths unprobed by either of his peers.
Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, of immigrant parents who, like Morris and Ida Bober of The Assistant, ran a small grocery store that stayed open late at night, leaving Malamud with little family life.
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