SOURCE: Alter, Iska. “The Natural, The Assistant, and American Materialism.” In The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, pp. 1-26. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981.

In the following essay, Alter examines the “democratic dilemma” in Malamud's fiction.

In the explosion of Jewish-American fiction that has characterized this country's literary history since the Second World War, Bernard Malamud's work retains a certain singularity in both subject matter and form. Without the exuberant self-promotion of Norman Mailer, the black and bitter humor of Joseph Heller, the increasing self-absorption of Philip Roth, or, more significantly, the moral comedy of Saul Bellow, Malamud has continued to be a humanistic spokesman, albeit a frequently disappointed one in recent years, for responsibility, compassion, and goodness in a world spinning out of control with frightening speed. To embody his concerns as a Jew, an artist, and a moral man, Malamud...