"As a writer, I want uncertainty. It's part of life. I want something the reader is uncertain about," Malamud said in a 1966 interview. This he has certainly achieved [in Dubin's Lives]. Though Dubin, to a large extent Kitty, and to a lesser one Fanny, are rich and appealing characters, much remains puzzling about the novel. More than any of Malamud's previous works, it is "literary," a bookish book: not only Thoreau and Lawrence are evoked, but also Keats, Montaigne, Swift, Fitzgerald, Hardy (subject of Malamud's own master's thesis). There are strong suggestions of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," that classic tale of an older man's pursuit of youth. Like Mann's hero, Dubin appears in Venice in gaudy clothes, thinks of dyeing his hair, is haunted by an elusive redhead, is deceived by a rascally gondolier. Other signs and portents abound: Fanny's half-eaten fruit (pear or peach, never apple); Kitty's first husband, Nathanael (Willis, not West, despite the identical off-beat spelling of the first names); daughter Maud's experiences, so similar to Fanny's, that, were her character more fully developed, she could be seen as Fanny's double; Dubin's later work with Maud on Anna Freud, daughter of a famous father.
What does it all add up to? During Dubin's massive depression, Kitty theorizes about the sources of his writer's block: "You hit the jackpot with H. D. Thoreau. You want, naturally, to repeat with D. H. Lawrence. It's inhibiting—you're afraid you won't. You must think of yourself as being off the Rock Candy Mountain, plodding along a plateau, hunting another mountain." Kitty is wrong—it's sexual, not professional frustration that is blocking Dubin; yet in a sense she may also be right, more so about Malamud than about Dubin. Having struck out in a new direction, away from the subject-matter of his former successes, Malamud seems not yet to have found a secure footing. (pp. 57-8)
Harriet Polt, "Malamud's Lives," in Midstream (copyright © 1980 by The Theodor Herzl Foundation, Inc.), Vol. XXVI, No. 1, January, 1980, pp. 57-8.
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