Sep 5, 2008
A New Life continues Malamud's treatment, begun in The Natural and refined in The Assistant, of the search for self-definition. This most picaresque of his works follows the struggles of S. Levin, a young professor from New York who hopes to redeem what he perceives as a failed life through relocation to a technical college in the Northwest. Set in the 1950's, the novel substitutes the mythic placelessness of Malamud's earlier novels with a Stendhalian realism replete with topical allusions to the Cold War, McCarthyism, and liberalism versus loyalty oaths.
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