Malamud, Bernard - Iska Alter (essay date 1981)
Iska Alter (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: Alter, Iska. “The Natural, The Assistant, and American Materialism.” In The Good Man's Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, pp. 1-26. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981.
[In the following essay, Alter examines the “democratic dilemma” in Malamud's fiction.]
In the explosion of Jewish-American fiction that has characterized this country's literary history since the Second World War, Bernard Malamud's work retains a certain singularity in both subject matter and form. Without the exuberant self-promotion of Norman Mailer, the black and bitter humor of Joseph Heller, the increasing self-absorption of Philip Roth, or, more significantly, the moral comedy of Saul Bellow, Malamud has continued to be a humanistic spokesman, albeit a frequently disappointed one in recent years, for responsibility, compassion, and goodness in a world spinning out of control with frightening...
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