When do we give up on a novelist? Sometimes, if it be foul enough, a single sentence will do the job…. But what if the writer has acquired a reputation as a serious and highly accomplished artist, thought in some quarters to be a major novelist, a modern master even? What if, more complicated still, he has given you pleasure, insight into the working of the human heart, and other novelistic rewards in the past? What if he writes one poor book, then a second, then yet a third? At what point do you con...

[The] work of Bernard Malamud seems very much to exhibit [a] strain of naive-modernist fiction, though, like Bellow's, it is largely a work of critical consolidation. If Bellow is in the "hotter" tradition of James, Malamud takes the "cooler" modes of an early modern like Anderson, assimilates them, and makes them his own, though he does not really (nor does he need to) transform them. But Malamud's best work is no simple art. He uses as effectively as any critical ...