Bernard Malamud has been a patient student of life's mysteries, a steady worker in the craft of fiction and, of course, one of our major writers, but he is hardly a novelist of large canvas or big risk. His protagonists begin their respective sufferings in medias res, generally in settings (e.g. rundown grocery stores, Czarist prisons, jerkwater colleges) that reinforce the entombing point. Not since the heyday of the Russian novel have there been such endlessly dragged-out winters, especially when his luckless characters fall in love. At its most reductive, the point of all the agony and ersatz Yiddish seems to be that sensitive men are forced to endure the world's pain and, therefore, that all sensitive men are also sensitive Jews. It has proved to be a very popular, but very dubious, equation.
Dubin's Lives is made of headier stuff, at once out to show off Malamud's hard-earned wisdom and to reveal how perplexed about it all he still remains. It is also a novel out to beat Saul Bellow at his own game. By that I mean, Bellow's protagonists have a way of convincing us that they have the raw brain power necessary to get our social engine on the right track. (p. 108)
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