In the following essay, Hicks presents Malamud's The Fixer as a work containing literary greatness, dealing with a man who suffered injustice and who learned both to endure and to resist.

If I say, as I am prepared to do, that Bernard Malamud's The Fixer is one of the finest novels of the postwar period, I don't see how there can be much argument. If, however, I go on to agree with the publishers that it is a "great" novel, I may be in semantic difficulties. Recently I asserted that there is greatness in John Barth's Giles Goat-boy, which I believe to be true. Robert Scholes, on the other hand, writing in the New York Times Book Review, admitted of no qualification; he said flatly that it is "a great novel." He made a good case, too, but at the end he brought in an argument that...