SOURCE: "Malamud, Bellow, and Roth," in On Culture and Literature, Horizon Press, 1970, pp. 200-233.

[In the following essay, which was originally published in 1966, Mudrick considers the early works of Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth as attempts to define the twentieth-century American Jew in fiction.]

Malamud, Bellow, and Roth have taken upon themselves the job of inventing the contemporary fictional Jew. In contemporary America, where Jewishness has been more and more rapidly converging into the WASP matrix of neutral pristine affluence, the job is almost anachronistic, almost archeology, like setting up a wailing wall in a supermarket. It is as if a Hebrew patriarch, having outlived the wife of his youth, had married the wife of his old age and fathered three sons to say Kaddish for him in post-ghetto America: Bernard, traditional and belated down to the self-protective ghetto humor, a pillar of the synagogue, rather prosaic maybe but steady and reliable, his father's son; then Saul, irresistible talker, promoter, last of the big-time spenders, flashy, wilful, hypnotically charming, bottomlessly cynical and sad, home only for the high holidays when he puts on the skullcap and a pious face for services; finally Philip, nervous, vulnerable, the doomed and delicate one, least committed to the past and most troubled by the future, whom all the family fusses over and is apprehensively fond of. In post-1945 America they are not unlike Faulkner of the twenties and thirties, appropriating a subject which was already slipping out of sight at the time he began to write about it. To mention Faulkner is to propose a standard which they cannot meet, but which suggests their provincialism and their seriousness. Malamud, Bellow, and Roth are, in a dry spell for American fiction, the most intelligent and the most considerable American novelists since World War II.

What a dry spell, though! with even the better novelists redoing the slick-magazine iconographies of war, of Hollywood and New York glamor, of struggle against social injustice, of existentialism or Zen or voodoo or camp, of publicity and news; until so (probably) talented a writer as Norman Mailer can publish in Esquire his pop-novel An American Dream, which regurgitates, installment by installment, all the chic pipedreams that readers of Esquire customarily derive from its ads and cover articles. Against such stuff, Malamud's owlish attention to every can of beans on the shelves of a failing grocery reads like Tolstoy; Roth's Martha Reganhart is Helen of Troy; Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm, Hamlet and Faust. Still, it had better be clear that the claims for Malamud, Bellow, and Roth will have to be modest enough, and that they will exclude much or most of the work. For instance, The Natural is a very silly novel, a comic-book sports story tricked out with sex and a moral. Much of Bellow, especially Augie and Henderson, is an obfuscatory whirlwind of juvenile pep and philosophizing (Henderson thinks, talks, and behaves—at fifty-five!—with the shy, gawky, endearingly brainless innocence of Holden Caulfield). And Goodbye, Columbus is a collection of stories—knowing, ironic, salted with symbols, assembled according to the best models—by the most promising member of the advanced creative writing class at State U.

Goodbye, Columbus is a characteristic false start by a bright young man. It is also, under its machined surface, vexed by emotions it can't begin to cope with. Roth, almost a generation younger than the others, was in his middle twenties when it appeared in 1959: an acclaimed volume whose twists and gimmicks are mainly at the service of Roth's never satisfactorily explained distaste for the nearly assimilated Jew. The long title story is typical—an expose of country-club Jews with gobs of money, whose son is large enough to have played Big Ten basketball (though his name is Patimkin), whose daughter has the comparable temerity to play tennis, bob her nose (even though her name is not Wentworth or MacDonald but Patimkint), and in the end choose her family over a penniless young Jewish librarian as lachrymose as he is uninterruptedly self-congratulatory. At a critical moment, for instance, the librarian meditates in St. Patrick's Cathedral—daring and ironic setting—on whether bed with beautiful Brenda would compensate for all the revolting, Jewish material comfort he would have to put up with (Brenda, meanwhile, is at the doctor's being fitted with a diaphragm):

It wasn't much cooler inside the church, though the stillness and the flicker of the candles made me think it was. I took a seat at the rear and while I couldn't bring myself to kneel, I did lean forward onto the back of the bench before me, and held my hands together and closed my eyes. I wondered if I looked like a Catholic, and in my wonderment I began to make a little speech to myself. Can I call the self-conscious words I spoke prayer? At any rate, I called my audience God. God, I said, I am twenty-three years old. I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain this is all for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? The race is to the swift. Should I have stopped to think?

I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it's that we're carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of you. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?

It was an ingenious meditation, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I got up and walked outside, and the noise of Fifth Avenue met me with an answer:

Which prize do you think, schmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods trees, nectarines, garbage disposals, bumpless noses, Patimkin Sink, Bonwit Teller—

But, damn it, God, that is You!

And God only laughed, that clown.

Stephen Dedalus, another sniveling prig who detested his compatriots, had better reasons.

Malamud and Bellow, each almost two decades older than Roth, grew up in the very different Jewish milieu of the Depression, an enclave of the poor and the unassimilated; and their earliest efforts to deal with it take no account of the fact that it had virtually disappeared by the time they began to write. Moreover, before they came to it, they made false starts in other directions. Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, is an attempt to turn the plight of a man waiting to be drafted (during World War II) into an allegory of the rootlessness of modern life, a malicious and penetrating self-analysis by a new underground man; but Bellow's rhetoric, even when he's being unbearably profound—

The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation. Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been removed, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.

—amounts to little more than that people get awfully tired of waiting. As for Malamud's first novel, The Natural is a lamentable attempt to take baseball seriously (Ring Lardner did the best that could be done, fictionally, with the game by assuming that everybody who makes a career of it is an imbecile).

It was in their second novels that both Bellow and Malamud took up the subject of the Jew in America. Bellow's title, The Victim, might have been Malamud's too, and proposes their emphasis and intention. The Victim was published in 1947, when Buchenwald was topical enough to mask the fact that anti-Semitism would not be among the political issues of the future. Bellow was still writing allegory, and it was still very literary: this time with echoes of "The Secret Sharer" and other Doppelgdnger stories; this time drawn out well beyond the novella length of Dangling Man by masses of naturalistic and symbolic detail, by thriller-like accumulations of suspense and (startlingly irrelevant) complications of plot. Dangling Man tries to convert the topical into allegory and literature, and so does The Victim. But Bellow doesn't manage to sense that aspect of the topical which will outlast the day, as, say, Dostoevsky did with the newspaper murder story that launched The Possessed. Indeed, Bellow stakes everything on the unimpaired survival of the topical, as if newspapers were history; so that when his inquisitor-victim, Allbee, deplores the mongrelization of America—

"Hell, yes. Well, you look like Caliban in the first place," Allbee said, more serious than not. "But that's not all I mean. You personally, you're just one out of many. Many kinds. You wouldn't be able to see that. Sometimes I feel—and I'm saying this seriously—I feel as if I were in a sort of Egyptian darkness. You know, Moses punished the Egyptians with darkness. And that's how I often think of this. When I was born, when I was a boy, everything was different. We thought it would be daylight forever. Do you know, one of my ancestors was Governor Winthrop. Governor Winthrop!" His voice vibrated fiercely; there was a repressed laugh in it. "I'm a fine one to be talking about tradition, you must be saying. But still I was born into it. And try to imagine how New York affects me. Isn't it preposterous? It's really as if the children of Caliban were running everything. You go down in the subway and Caliban gives you two nickels for your dime. You go home and he has a candy store in the street where you were born. The old breeds are out. The streets are named after them. But what are they themselves? Just remnants."

" see how it is; you're actually an aristocrat," said Leventhal.

"It may not strike you as it struck me," said Allbee. "But I go into the library once in a while, to look around, and last week I saw a book about Thoreau and Emerson by a man named Lipschitz …"

—when Allbee articulates his hatred, what at our distance in time we hear is not a threat and a prophecy, but a voice from a newspaper morgue. Bellow has failed to observe that, though the topical contains the threat, to reproduce the topical is not to isolate or identify the threat, which, to the confusion of newspaper-readers and apprentice novelists, insists on changing its habitat and appearance and therefore its name from one edition of the daily press to the next. Nor does Bellow regain our confidence at the end by losing his own, when he shrugs off the whole plot as a bad season through which Leventhal has safely passed. It meant more than that to the protagonist at the time, and to the author; and counted on meaning more than that to us.

Ten years later, and as much farther from Buchenwald, Malamud wrote his own version of The Victim. The Assistant also sees the Jew as allegorical, representative, and bedeviled, in a context—economic for Malamud, as it was political for Bellow—that recalls 1937 rather than 1957:

He felt weightless, unmanned, the victim in a motion of whatever blew at his back; wind, worries, debts, Karp, holdupniks, ruin. He did not go, he was pushed. He had the will of a victim, no will to speak of.

"For what I worked so hard for? Where is my youth, where did it go?"

The years had passed without profit or pity. Who could he blame? What fate didn't do to him he had done to himself. The right thing was to make the right choice but he made the wrong. Even when it was right it was wrong. To understand why, you needed an education but he had none. All he knew was he wanted better but had not after all these years learned how to get it. Luck was a gift. Karp had it, a few of his old friends had it, well-to-do men with grandchildren already, while his poor daughter, made in his image, faced—if not actively sought—oldmaidhood. Life was meager, the world changed for the worse. America had become too complicated. One man counted for nothing. There were too many stores, depressions, anxieties …

Or the view may be from outside the pale, as when the Italian assistant observes the Jewish readiness for shared misery:

When Breitbart first came to Morris' neighborhood and dropped into the store, the grocer, seeing his fatigue, offered him a glass of tea with lemon. The peddler eased the rope off his shoulder and set his boxes on the floor. In the back he gulped the hot tea in silence, warming both hands on the glass. And though he had, besides his other troubles, the seven-year itch, which kept him awake half the night, he never complained. After ten minutes he got up, thanked the grocer, fitted the rope onto his lean and itchy shoulder and left. One day he told Morris the story of his life and they both wept.

That's what they live for, Frank thought, to suffer. And the one that has got the biggest pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest without running to the toilet is the best Jew. No wonder they got on his nerves.

One of the differences between Bellow and Malamud is in their tutelary divinities. In his first two novels Bellow is writing with a self-conscious awareness of Conrad, of Dostoevsky, of such quasi-literary metaphysical agonists as Kierkegaard and Sartre: his allegory too easily disentangles itself from plot and aims at an independent and unprovincial Weltanschauung. In The Victim Bellow is impatient with the stereotype of the Jew, he wants the Jew to be a man, and then Man; Leventhal is recognizably enough an image of the New York Jew, but his crisis is too quickly a crisis of Western civilization, or too quickly intends to be. Moreover Bellow is handicapped in his strenuous purpose by an inert and colorless style, naturalism without its possible saving doggedness of accuracy on how people pass the days of a life; nothing like, for instance, the precision and hallucinatory intimations of Conrad's best prose; nor much like Malamud either.

Malamud embraces without reservation the provincialism he has no interest in evading: his Depression Jews, their undisplaceable identity, the dreary inventory of local impedimenta that keep them where they are, and the style that may be all too faithful an analogue of their cluttered, graceless, and well-meaning lives. Malamud's great exemplar is Hardy. Like Hardy, he has a tin ear except for the dialectal speech of his locality; like Hardy, he is in no hurry to be cosmopolitan; like Hardy, he believes with the passion of perfect knowledge in what unexceptional people do. It is of course a question of likeness and not equality: Malamud resembles Hardy in subject, in method, in knowledge and conviction, in limitations, though not in size. But Bellow, aspiring to be Dostoevsky, achieves the master's occasional impression of melodramatic strain without suggesting either Dostoevsky's magnitude or any of his virtues.

Malamud, like Hardy, has the provincial bias. The allegorical intentions of The Assistant—like Hardy's cosmic backdrops to the events of heath and village—are momentous because Malamud really believes that life lived close to subsistence, close to the level of animal need (and therefore close to "nature," in a setting as claustrophobic as Hardy's though urban rather than rural), is the truest and most representative life, it tests the spirit and insists on the most unequivocal manifestations of fortitude, loyalty, and love. Malamud's conviction leads him to construct an allegory of expiation, prodigious labors, self-sacrifice, and what might be called—after the two millennia of the Christian ascendancy—reconversion; and his knowledge of the ordinariness out of which such extraordinary manifestations must come is so patient and unsparing that the allegory becomes simply the meaning of the events—of an event, for example, as impersonally traditional, as mechanical, as full of indispensable lies and omissions, as a rabbi's eulogy at the funeral of a man he never knew:

"My dear friends, I never had the pleasure to meet this good grocery man that he now lays in his coffin. He lived in a neighborhood where I didn't come in. Still and all I talked this morning to people that knew him and I am now sorry I didn't know him also. I would enjoy to speak to such a man. I talked to the bereaved widow, who lost her dear husband. I talked to his poor beloved daughter Helen, who is now without a father to guide her. To them I talked, also to landsleit and old friends, and each and all told me the same, that Morris Bober, who passed away so untimely—he caught double pneumonia from shoveling snow in front of his place of business so people could pass by on the sidewalk—was a man who couldn't be more honest. Such a person I am sorry I didn't meet sometime in my life. If I met him somewhere, maybe when he came to visit in a Jewish neighborhood—maybe at Rosh Hashana or Pesach—I would say to him, 'God bless you, Morris Bober.' Helen, his dear daughter, remembers from when she was a small girl that her father ran two blocks in the snow to give back to a poor Italian lady a nickel that she forgot on the counter. Who runs in wintertime without hat or coat, without rubbers to protect his feet, two blocks in the snow to give back five cents that a customer forgot? Couldn't he wait till she comes in tomorrow? Not Morris Bober, let him rest in peace. He didn't want the poor woman to worry, so he ran after her in the snow. This is why the grocer had so many friends who admired him …"

The grocer's daughter knows better: "… I didn't say he had many friends who admired him. That's the rabbi's invention. People liked him, but who can admire a man passing his life in such a store? He buried himself in it; he didn't have the imagination to know what he was missing. He made himself a victim. He could, with a little more courage, have been more than he was." But the rabbi's lies are the last dignity that the corpse earned by dying; and the truths are what Frank Alpine, the hoodlum assistant, builds on with his terrible effort to transform himself into the man he robbed. Malamud's powers are not up to convincing us of the probability of Frank's ultimate decision. And the novel is more convincingly a funeral eulogy than a prospect of the future, Frank's or anybody else's. But The Assistant is a failure only in its terminal insistence on allegorical tidiness.

The subject of The Assistant is the Jew as victim and example; and it is a subject that attracts Malamud sufficiently to bring him back to it in several of his short stories: "The Mourners," for instance, "The First Seven Years," "The Death of Me," or "The Cost of Living," of which the last reads like a suicidally despondent first draft of The Assistant. Or the Jew is a butt, as in the farcial and sometimes very funny stories about Fidelman, the student painter in Europe, on one occasion imprisoned by an Italian thug who for the sake of an elaborate ransom scheme forces him to make a copy of the "Venus of Urbino":

What a miracle, thought Fidelman.

The golden brown-haired Venus, a woman of the real world, lay on her couch in serene beauty, her hand lightly touching her intimate mystery, the other holding red flowers, her nude body her truest accomplishment.

"I would have painted somebody in bed with her," Scarpio said.

"Shut up," said Fidelman.

Scarpio, hurt, left the gallery.

Fidelman, alone with Venus, worshipped the painting. What magnificent tones, what extraordinary flesh that can turn the body into spirit.

While Scarpio was out talking to the guard, the copyist hastily sketched the Venus, and with a Leica Angelo had borrowed from a friend for the purpose, took several new color shots.

Afterwards he approached the picture and kissed the lady's hands, thighs, and breasts, but as he was murmuring, "I love you," a guard struck him hard on the head with both fists.

Or the Jew is a genre figure in a provincial setting that emphasizes, not the imminence of ruin, but the proliferations of custom and idiosyncrasy, as when the rabbinical student consults the matchmaker in the title story of The Magic Barrel:

Salzman … placed the card down on the wooden table and began to read another:

"Lily H. high school teacher. Regular. Not a substitute. Has savings and new Dodge car. Lived in Paris one year. Father is successful dentist thirty-five years. Interested in professional man. Well Americanized family. Wonderful opportunity."

"I know her personally," said Salzman. "I wish you could see this girl. She is a doll. Also very intelligent. All day you could talk to her about books and theater and what not. She also knows current events." …

"… but I'm not interested in … school teachers."

Salzman pulled his clasped hands to his breast. Looking at the ceiling he devoutly exclaimed, "Yiddishe kinder, what can I say to somebody that he is not interested in high school teachers? So what then you are interested?"

Leo flushed but controlled himself.

"In what else will you be interested," Salzman went on, "if you not interested in this fine girl that she speaks four languages and has personally in the bank ten thousand dollars? Also her father guarantees further twelve thousand. Also she has a new car, wonderful clothes, talks on all subjects, and she will give you a first-class home and children. How near do we come in our life to paradise?"

There are also fantasies, in a Yiddish tradition of tales of the supernatural—encounters with angels and other emissaries of God and the Devil—a tradition of which the distinguished living exponent is Isaac Bashevis Singer; but Malamud doesn't altogether avoid the temptation which the mode offers to whimsy (as in "The Jewbird" and "Angel Levine"), or to an unvalidated presumption of superearthly issues (as in "Take Pity" and the title story of Idiots First). The fact is that, after The Assistant, Malamud's interest in the Jew as fictional subject is never so intense, so apocalyptic, it becomes increasingly ironic and remote, even exploitative. The victim and example is becoming a sad sack, a vaudeville comic down to the pratfalls and rubber nightsticks, possibly a holy innocent in a world of sharpers. The ghetto is turning into a stage.

Bellow, too, after The Victim, seems to have lost interest in the subject; or rather to have grown impatient with its limitations. His spectacular attempts to break it up and to break away from it are, respectively, The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King.

In Augie, as in The Victim, the protagonist is a Jew; but in all other ways Bellow seems resolved to turn inside into out and down into up. The Victim is a closed system, heavily plotted, in a setting as fixed as that of The Assistant; Augie is open, episodic, picaresque. The hero of The Victim is a Jew and therefore somehow a stranger and under surveillance in America; Augie March is a Jew almost fortuitously and without consequence, but from the first sentence "an American, Chicago born," who recollects the anti-Semitic brutalities inflicted upon him in his childhood only to disclaim their influence on him:

… I never had any special grief from it, or brooded, being by and large too larky and boisterous to take it to heart, and looked at it as needing no more special explanation than the stone-and-bat wars of the street gangs or the swarming on a fall evening of parish punks to rip up fences, screech and bawl at girls, and beat up strangers.

And, as the foregoing quotation suggests, Bellow has contrived a style for Augie's speaking voice that he hopes will convey a "larky and boisterous" quality as unlike the flatfooted somberness of The Victim as possible.

Not that Bellow abandons the Jews. What he does is transmogrify them into a great elbowing parade of the unsubduable robust (not at all the trampled and wailing ghetto pygmies); so that by page 20 the reader is near exhaustion from descriptions of consecutive giants and monsters:

That would be Five Properties, shambling through the cottage, Anna's immense brother, long armed and humped, his head grown off the thick band of muscle as original as a bole on his back …

The intention resembles Isaac Babel's in his Odessa stories. Babel's heroic desperado, Benya Krik, is not, as Babel has the narrator remark, called the King for nothing; and Babel accomplishes the tour deforce of turning into credible giants Jews who still inhabited the Odessa ghetto. Babel is Benya's affectionate Homer, the lyrical magnifier of his fame; but Babel has a wink for the reader as well as respect for Benya's impressive deeds. Bellow's giants, though, are less agile, they are even torpid and muscle-bound, perhaps because there are so many of them that he can scarcely do more than describe them one to a page, perhaps also because he insists on stressing, not (as Babel does) the comic excess of their vitality, but their mere size.

Bellow's intention is to show the ghetto Jews as worthy progenitors of Augie the all-American boy, pure metal fresh from the melting pot; but his method is less to invent actions than to attack the reader with a calculated hubbub of assertions, data, objects, Whitmanic catalogues and lists, historical and philosophical references (Augie is bookish, a good Jewish trait), wry humor (issue of a good Jewish head), and that colloquial pitchmanship which will die trying or amalgamate all of these into a new (if you'll pardon the expression) Jerusalem, American style, a city of Olympic-size swimming pools and matching plaster monuments:

William Einhorn was the first superior man I knew. He had a brain and many enterprises, real directing power, philosophical capacity, and if I were methodical enough to take thought before an important and practical decision and also (N. B.) if I were really his disciple and not what I am, I'd ask myself, "What would Caesar suffer in this case? What would Machiavelli advise or Ulysses do? What would Einhom think?" I'm not kidding when I enter Einhorn in this eminent list. It was him that I knew, and what I understand of them in him. Unless you want to say that we're at the dwarf end of all times and mere children whose only share in grandeur is like a boy's share in fairy-tale kings, being of a different kind from times better and stronger than ours. But if we're comparing men and men, not men and children or men and demigods, which is just what would please Caesar among us teeming democrats, and if we don't have any special wish to abdicate into some different, lower form of existence out of shame for our defects before the golden faces of these and other old-time men, then I have the right to praise Einhorn and not care about smiles of derogation from those who think the race no longer has in any important degree the traits we honor in these fabulous names …

—which is a fancy introduction for a man who occupies little space in the book, and most of that taken up by descriptions of his not infallible bent for minor-league commercial finagling. But then, Einhorn is a fixer, a user, an operator, a man of the world who will ceremoniously, at the right hour, conduct a growing boy to his first prostitute; and Bellow is determined to see such talents as, because he conceives them to be American, primary virtues.

Bellow, through Augie, is in hot pursuit of the American experience. He wishes to glorify and praise the inveterate American obsession—Jefferson and Pound are two of its illuminati—with particulars and how to handle them, expertness, know-how: mastery of data and process, especially mechanical and impersonal process, like capturing whales and carving and boiling them up into various neat messes of merchandise; and he equally admires the parallel obsession with grand reductive abstractions, as in Moby Dick (the nineteenth-century American novel that aspires to be the great American novel and therefore, since America is the ineluctable future, the great novel of the world). Augie will know all things and how they work, will use them up like paper in a flame; though out there, always, lies a darkness still more ineluctable than America:

However, as I felt on entering Erie, Pennsylvania, there is a darkness. It is for everyone. You don't, as perhaps some imagine, try it, one foot into it like a barbershop "September Morn." Nor are lowered into it with visitors' curiosity, as the old Eastern monarch was let down into the weeds inside a glass ball to observe the fishes. Nor are lifted straight out after an unlucky tumble, like a Napoleon from the mud of the Arcole where he had been standing up to his thoughtful nose while the Hungarian bullets broke the clay off the bank. Only some Greeks and admirers of theirs, in their liquid noon, where the friendship of beauty to human things was perfect, thought they were clearly divided from this darkness. And these Greeks too were in it. But still they are the admiration of the rest of the mud-sprung, famine-knifed, street-pounding, war-rattled, difficult, painstaking, kicked in the belly, grief and cartilage mankind, the multitude, some under a coal-sucking Vesuvius of chaos smoke, some inside a heaving Calcutta midnight, who very well know where they are.

Against this darkness, Augie's boyish charm avails him not. The best he can muster against it is a sequence of girls, some palaver about love as the infinite; most modestly and persuasively, affection for his brother, the rich businessman, whom Bellow presents with a truthful audacity that he mostly fakes for the others:

… Simon worked himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress. He tried to read the paper and cut her—he hadn't said a word when she came in—but finally he said, and I could see the devil in him now, "Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy your clothes off the janitor's wife."

"Let her alone," said Charlotte sharply.

But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law's dress at the collar, thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment it was, all of a sudden to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How she loved Simon! He knew it too.

"Hide, hide!" he said, laughing.

"You crazy fool," cried Charlotte. She ran away on her high heels to bring her mother a coat and came back laughing also. They were downright proud, I guess.

Simon wrote out a check and gave it to Mrs. Magnus. "Here," he said, "buy yourself something and don't come here looking like the scrubwoman." He went and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back two for one and with tremendous humor.

It is a fine and uncharacteristic moment, in a book that rings with the shrillness of unfulfilled ambitions.

The book is also very sad in its pretense of joy, the pretense of a self-reforming but unregenerate misanthrope. By the time of Henderson the Rain King, the pretense has become grotesque in its frantic didacticism and lack of conviction. Bellow is reduced to having his hero converse with Africans whose level of English is "I no know" or "I no bothah you" or "Me Horko"; and even when the Me-Tarzan-You-Jane dialogue is expanded for the King's quasi-Oxonian ontological ditherings about lions, Henderson continues to associate himself with such quaint locutions as "strong gift of life" and "the wisdom of life," such sudden illuminations as "I don't think the struggles of desire can ever be won," and such racy life-loving as follows: "I am a true adorer of life, and if I can't reach as high as the face of it, I plant my kiss somewhere lower down. Those who understand will require no further explanation." Bellow would like Henderson to be truly American, purebred old-stock Anglo-Saxon (of all things!), Paul Bunyan in an age of bad nerves; but Henderson in the pages of the book is half Augie, half catcher in the rye. One wonders whether Bellow has any notion of how much he is borrowing in postures and phony wistfulness from a writer so inferior to him as Salinger; especially at the embarrassing conclusion, when Henderson races round the plane with the child in his arms, that Salinger child (sometimes named Phoebe) who will redeem us all.

Between Augie and Henderson, Bellow produced his novella, Seize the Day, which is the real pastrami between two thick slices of American store bread. In Seize the Day Bellow comes to terms with his characteristic themes and obsessions, at least to the extent of setting them suitably down among the gross fleshy shocks of credible fictional encounters; between the derivativeness of The Victim and the modulated hysterias of Augie and Henderson he accomplishes, on a plateau of unharassed self-knowledge, a style that can deal honestly with the agonies he is elsewhere content to gloss over with solemn or breezy rhetoric. The wise man, for example, is a recurrent figure in Bellow: Schlossberg in The Victim, Einhorn in Augie, Dahfu in Henderson—none of whom, however, survives Bellow's insistence on the blaring unambiguous singleness of power and wisdom, the last golden words we must come to and stop at. His great discovery, in Seize the Day, is the duplicity and chanciness of wisdom, the charlatanry of power, the ungraspable difficulty and slipperiness of both; and his great illustration is the connection between the poor slob, the genuine baffled victim, Tommy Wilhelm, and the quicksilver conman, Dr. Tamkin:

"I want to tell you about this boy and his dad. It's highly absorbing. The father was a nudist. Everybody went naked in the house. Maybe the woman found men with clothes attractive. Her husband didn't believe in cutting his hair, either. He practiced dentistry. In his office he wore riding pants and a pair of boots, and he wore a green eyeshade."

"Oh, come off it," said Wilhelm.

"This is a true case history."

Without warning, Wilhelm began to laugh. He himself had had no premonition of his change of humor. His face became warm and pleasant, and he forgot his father, his anxieties; he panted bearlike, happily, through his teeth. "This sounds like a horse-dentist. He wouldn't have to put on pants to treat a horse. Now what else are you going to tell me? Did the wife play the mandolin? Does the boy join the cavalry? Oh, Tamkin, you really are a killer-diller."

"Oh, you think I'm trying to amuse you," said Tamkin. "That's because you aren't familiar with my outlook. I deal in facts. Facts always are sensational. I'll say that a second time. Facts always ! are sensational."

So they are; but Bellow has in other books impersonated Dr. Tamkin rather than understood him, this model of the contemporary mind, ragbag of public and private facts and fancies lavishly scattered like farts in a windstorm, as miscellaneous and unassemblable as amputated legs and arms, tumbling outward toward horizons of meaninglessness:

"Her brother. He's under my care, too. He has some terrible tendencies, which are to be expected when you have an epileptic sibling. I came into their lives when they needed help desperately, and took hold of them. A certain man forty years older than she had her in his control and used to give her fits by suggestion whenever she tried to leave him. If you only knew one per cent of what goes on in the city of New York. You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal. When the night comes and he feels like howling from his window like a wolf. I'm taking complete care of that young fellow and his sister. I have to steady him down or he'll go from Brazil to Australia the next day. The way I keep him in the here-and-now is by teaching him Greek."

This was a complete surprise! "What, do you know Greek?"

"A friend of mine taught me when I was in Cairo. I studied Aristotle with him to keep from being idle."

Wilhelm tried to take in these new claims and examine them. Howling from the window like a wolf when night comes sounded genuine to him. That was something really to think about. But the Greek! He realized that Tamkin was watching to see how he took it. More elements were continually being added. A few days ago Tamkin had hinted that he had once been in the underworld, one of the Detroit Purple Gang. He was once head of a mental clinic in Toledo. He had worked with a Polish inventor on an unsinkable ship. He was a technical consultant in the field of television. In the life of a man of genius, all of these things might happen. But had they happened to Tamkin? Was he a genius? He often said that he had attended some of the Egyptian royal family as a psychiatrist. "But everybody is alike, common or aristocrat," he told Wilhelm. "The aristocrat knows less about life."

An Egyptian princess whom he had treated in California, for horrible disorders he had described to Wilhelm, retained him to come back to the old country with her, and there he had had many of her friends and relatives under his care. They turned over a villa on the Nile to him. "For ethical reasons, I can't tell you many of the details about them," he said—but Wilhelm had already heard all these details, and strange and shocking they were, if true. If true—he could not be free from doubt. For instance, the general who had to wear ladies' silk stockings and stand otherwise naked before the mirror—and all the rest. Listening to the doctor when he was so strangely factual, Wilhelm had to translate his words into his own language, and he could not translate fast enough or find terms to fit what he heard.

Wisdom may, after all, turn out to be nothing more than somebody else's cockeyed and circumstantial dreams of glory:

"Those Egyptian big shots invested in the market, too, for the heck of it. What did they need extra money for? By association, I almost became a millionaire myself, and if I had played it smart there's no telling what might have happened. I could have been the ambassador." The American? The Egyptian ambassador? "A friend of mine tipped me off on the cotton. I made a heavy purchase of it. I didn't have that kind of money, but everybody there knew me. It never entered their minds that a person of their social circle didn't have dough. The sale was made on the phone. Then, while the cotton shipment was at sea, the price tripled. When the stuff suddenly became so valuable all hell broke loose on the world cotton market, they looked to see who was the owner of this big shipment. Me! They investigated my credit and found out I was a mere doctor, and they canceled. This was illegal. I sued them. But as I didn't have the money to fight them I sold the suit to a Wall Street lawyer for twenty thousand dollars. He fought it and was winning. They settled with him out of court for more than a million. But on the way back from Cairo, flying, there was a crash. All on board died. I have this guilt on my conscience, of being the murderer of that lawyer. Although he was a crook."

Wilhelm thought, I must be a real jerk to sit and listen to such impossible stories. I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does.

What's more, Tamkin is a poet; and here is the second stanza of his poem, "Mechanism Vs Functionalism: Ism Vs Hism":

Why-forth then dost thou tarryAnd partake thee only of the crustAnd skim the earth's surface narryWhen all creations art thy just?

Wilhelm's father, the ironic and self-contained Dr. Adler—all cold vanity—is an equally if less surprisingly solid character. And Wilhelm himself—at the mercy of his fears, his cannibalistic wife, his father, Dr. Tamkin, the stock market, the world—is, till the last scene, everybody's most exasperated secret image of himself, the Jew unmasked and un-Judaized, Everyman drowning in the shoreless multitudinousness of America. At the end, unluckily, Bellow thinks he has nowhere to go but up, up, up into the firmament of wishful allegory (so did Malamud at the end of The Assistant); and the funeral, which induces Wilhelm's presumptively clarifying tears, doesn't work. But Seize the Day is Bellow's triumph, and a large, distinctively American achievement.

Herzog, on the other hand, might well have been a disaster: this shapeless lament of an ill-tempered, narcissistic, misogynistic, megalomaniacal, pontificating, endlessly self-pitying middle-aged Jewish professor, lifelong patsy to wife and friends and now disgorging a lifetime of ineffectual spite at the very names of his betrayers:

Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeleine would never have married such a type. What she had been looking for, high and low, was precisely an ambitious Herzog. In order to trip him, bring him low, knock him sprawling and kick out his brains with a murderous bitch foot.

It is nevertheless, as this savaging of Madeleine indicates, an interesting and hectically energetic book. It has the energy and candor of a man too tired to put on customary masks, the wizard novelist's or Henderson's or Augie's: "the way you try to sound rough or reckless …," says Ramona, Herzog's mistress, "like a guy from Chicago … It's an act. Swagger. It's not really you." Herzog may occasionally play Augie for Ramona; but for us and himself he is Augie punctured, the swagger is out of him. Only humiliation and deep loathing, and the memories that reconstitute them hourly, are his present and future:

"Oh, balls! So now, we're going to hear how you SAVED me. Let's hear it again. What a frightened puppy I was. How I wasn't strong enough to face life. But you gave me LOVE, from your big heart, and rescued me from the priests. Yes, cured me of menstrual cramps by servicing me so good. You SAVED me. You SACRIFICED your freedom. I took you away from Daisy and your son, and your Japanese screw. Your important time and money and attention." Her wild blue glare was so intense that her eyes seemed twisted.

"Madeleine!"

"Oh—shit!"

"Just think a minute."

"Think? What do you know about thinking?"

"Maybe I married you to improve my mind!" said Herzog. "I'm learning."

"Well, I'll teach you, don't worry!" said the beautiful, pregnant Madeleine between her teeth.

His love is for the irrecoverable pre-American ghetto past, out of his pain he submerges into the delusion of completeness and unattempted potencies:

Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather—the bootlegger's boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find. The children of the race, by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found. What was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there. His mother did the wash, and mourned. His father was desperate and frightened, but obstinately fighting. His brother Shura with staring disingenuous eyes was plotting to master the world, to become a millionaire. His brother Willie struggled with asthmatic fits. Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow. His sister Helen had long white gloves which she washed in thick suds. She wore them to her lessons at the conservatory, carrying a leather music roll. Her diploma hung in a frame. Mile. Helene Herzog … avec distinction. His soft prim sister who played the piano.

Back! cries poor Herzog (and Bellow seems to be crying it too), back to the racial—if not the maternal—womb. It is a sincere cry, the sentimentality of the damned, and one hesitates to laugh at it.

The novel ought to be titled Who Killed Herzog? or, Placing the Blame Squarely on Anybody Else's Shoulders. The Jewish-American writer is at last bereft of his familiar incubus: anti-Semitism is no longer there to lean one's justly suffering soul against; and Bellow relies on what he calls the "Jewish art of tears" to make the case: "Herzog wrote, Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." Yet whenever the case isn't being made, and often when it is, the weary and compulsive straightforwardness of the statement makes for a kind of authenticity which Bellow nowhere else approaches except in Seize the Day, and which—engaging a more complex or at least a more disorderly protagonist—keeps alive and unconsummated a promise of bigger fish than Tommy Wilhelm or even Dr. Tamkin. Herzog's unmailed letters, taking up chapters in this self-indulgent novel, are hot air left over from Augie and Henderson; and Herzog's "equilibrium" at the end, which Bellow seems to regard as an Oriental calm of perfect awareness, is just brute apathy after unendurable exertions of the spirit, before the old rationalizations and remorses build up their necessary steam again. If only Bellow knew what he was seeing! But most of the time, in Herzog, he doesn't. Nor does he much care either; and so he makes only token efforts to get in the way of what he's seeing, which is the modern comedy of the exhausted and undefeatable ego.

Malamud's Jewish hero has no such traumas to struggle through since he doesn't begin with such a dose of hubris as Bellow's. When Malamud's Jew leaves the ghetto, he becomes not a displaced person but—as a number of the short stories have already made clear—a tourist. In Europe he has an American passport, glories in the scenery, does his best to sample the women. In Cascadia, the Northwestern locale of A New Life, he has the graduate school's passport to a college teaching job: his name is Levin. He is Malamud's holy innocent again, a timid, fumbling, yearning young idealist. Infants he politely picks up urinate over him, thwarted rivals steal his clothes while he is trying to make love (some day a scholarly article will be published on how many times in Malamud's fiction somebody's coitus is interrupted), his first day in class is a sensation but only because he has neglected to close his fly, automobiles are mysteries to him and turn his pleasure trip into a nightmare. Like Fidelman in love with a painted nude, he is always grateful for beauty—the beauty of the scenery for instance:

They were driving along an almost deserted highway, in a broad farm-filled valley between distant mountain ranges laden with forests, the vast sky piled high with towering masses of golden clouds. The trees softly clustered on the river side of the road were for the most part deciduous; those crawling over the green hills to the south and west were spear-tipped fir.

My God, the West, Levin thought. He imagined the pioneers in covered wagons entering this valley for the first time, and found it a moving thought. Although he had lived little in nature Levin had always loved it, and the sense of having done the right thing in leaving New York was renewed in him. He shuddered at his good fortune.

—and, of course, the beauty of women:

"Why can't we take one of the blankets off a cow?" Levin asked. "We'll put it back later."

"If you look good you'll see the cows don't sleep with blankets on them. They'd get sick if they did."

Laverne spread the horse blanket on the ground, and standing on it began to undress. She was neat with her clothes, folding each thing and putting it down on a hay bale nearby. Levin placed his hat, trousers, and shoes stuffed with socks and garters, next to her things. He kept his shorts on.

Watching the girl undress in the shadowy light of the lamp in the stall, Levin felt for her an irresistible desire. Ah, the miraculous beauty of women. He considered falling in love with her but gave up the idea. He embraced Laverne and they kissed passionately.

"Your breasts," he murmured, "smell like hay."

"I always wash well," she said.

"I meant it as a compliment."

Ah, women! especially when they're not hanging around all the time to spoil that instant of beauty which is like a fading coal. While Levin is having an affair with a married woman, who has a family to get back to and a gift for quick orgasm, he experiences a bachelor's vision of the earthly paradise:

She visited him not often but often enough. One of her "meetings" was a good enough excuse for a night out. And Gilley assisted by teaching a winter-term weekly extension course for teachers, in Marathon. Usually Pauline walked the dozen blocks to Levin's. When she had the car she parked it about two blocks from the house. Gilley was home from Marathon by eleven. She had left Levin's room at ten-thirty, short but sweet. He could read afterwards without a stray thought, a great convenience. He envisioned a new Utopia, everyone over eighteen sexually satisfied, aggression reduced, peace in the world.

If Malamud had been content to go on and on in this idyllic vein, A New Life might have done for Cascadia what Typee did for the South Seas: Come to the great state of Cascadia, admire our mountains, climb our wives. But Malamud is writing—worse luck—one of those academic novels, in which every professional type since Aristotle must be described, for the benefit of the book-club subscribers, in stupefyingly predictable detail down to the last wart, as if every college were a zoo of unheard-of beasts rather than just another enclosure for the same old fictional lapdogs, tabbies, and pet rats: the elderly stuffed prune of a chairman, the unworthy claimant, the snappish recluse, the departmental nymphomaniac, even the ghost of a departed young Turk who once threatened the whole establishment. The contest for the chairmanship fairly makes one's flesh crawl: Will evil be routed and good prevail? Will Levin get caught rifling everybody else's files? Will Levin's mistress muck up everything, as women usually do?

The trouble is that Malamud himself, through Levin, has notions about life on earth which, though more wistful and appealing than, say, Augie's, are not less extraneous to the action of the novel. Malamud really believes, when his shrewdness deserts him for the moment, that life is a contest between good and evil, or at least between readily distinguishable good and evil impulses:

Good was as if man's spirit had produced art in life. Levin felt that the main source of conscious morality was love of life, anybody's life. Morality was a way of giving value to other lives through assuring human rights. As you valued men's lives yours received value. You earned what you sold, got what you gave. That, if not entirely true, ought to be. Our days are short, thought Levin, our bodies frail. The universe is unknown, remorseless. We have no certain understanding of Nature's intentions, nor God's if he intends. We know the meagerness, ignorance, cruelty of too many men and too many societies. We must protect the human, the good, the innocent. Those who had discovered their own moral courage or created it, must join others who are moral; these must lead, without fanaticism. Any act of good is a diminution of evil in the world.

In the context of the novel, these moony speculations are provoked by Levin's feelings of guilt about his adulterous affair with a woman whom he understands very well:

She had caused herself to love out of discontent, although her discontents were tolerable. Gilley was good to her; she had a better than average home, kids she loved. Maybe she was bored but she wasn't desperate; she probably could go on living with him forever. If diversion was what she had wanted, a little love on the side, she wasn't made for it, the pleasure butchered by anxiety and shame. She wasn't the type who could give "all" for love. And he doubted he could inspire such love, the limits of her passion conditioned by the man he was.

The most surprisingly effective scene in the novel is Levin's last confrontation with the husband, who confirms with sheaves of blood-curdling evidence what his wife (any wife?) is like:

… She was born dissatisfied … you'll wake up at six A.M. to hear her already going on about her life and how it didn't pan out as she wanted it to. When you ask her what she had expected, all she can tell you is that she wanted to be a better person than she is … Then you will hear in long detail everything she thinks she has done wrong, or those things she tried to do and had to give up, or everything she now does and does badly. She will never once tell you what she does well, which can get pretty monotonous. After that she'll blame you for as much as she blames herself, because you married her … and didn't do what she calls 'bring me out,' meaning make out of her something she couldn't make out of herself though you may have broken your back trying to think up new ways to do it …

Moreover, according to Gilley's inexorable testimony, she's a rotten housekeeper and cook, has constipation and female ailments, is afraid of doctors, and lacks the moral capacity to be grateful for past pleasures. When Levin, notwithstanding, persists in his decision to carry her off,

Gilley stared at him. "You expect to go on with this after what I've told you?"
Levin laughed badly.

So does the reader, not only badly but incredulously, as Levin the gentle boob, deprived of job and illusions, long since deprived of love ("Was it a guilty response to experience he should have accepted as one accepts sunlight? Why must he forever insist on paying for being alive?"), drives off into the sunset with somebody else's pregnant wife and children. Maybe Jews are just born to suffer; though we had better hopes at the outset for Levin the starry-eyed scenery-buff, shy pursuer of pretty students, and happy home-wrecker. As for the novel, from an often amusing travelogue it abruptly collapses into one more allegory of self-crucifixion. But Levin is no Frank Alpine. And Malamud may have nowhere else to take his hero except on trips to each of the other forty-nine states or to Europe again; or back to the primordial ghetto.

The question is, now that the twentieth century is two-thirds finished, Whatever became of the Jew in America? In Malamud's fiction he survives as a tourist without a past; in Bellow's, barely and sourly as a displaced person, an alien tolerated and unloved, hankering after vanished patriarchal simplicities. In Letting Go, he is altogether absorbed into a culture he despises as much as he despises the culture from which he sprang. Whereas in Goodbye, Columbus Roth is unintentionally disagreeable (or, in several of the shorter stories, condescendingly sentimental) about a past that shames and exasperates him, in Letting Go he is intentionally and unrelentingly disagreeable about a present whose disgusts and anxieties play no favorites among the egos they feed on. After Libby's abortion, she and Paul come home to face another nightmare scene, in which the elderly Korngold, having been bilked by the equally elderly con-man, the reptilian Levy, appeals to Paul for help. Paul helps by almost strangling Levy, who eventually escapes and discharges his venom:

But Levy was now in the doorway, slicing the air with his cane. Everyone jumped back as he made a vicious X with his weapon. "Disgusting! Killer!" he cried, slashing away. "Scraping life down sewers! I only make my way in the world, an old shit-on old man. I only want to live, but a murderer, never! This is your friend, Korngold," announced Levy. "This is your friend and accomplice, takes a seventeen-year-old girl and cuts her life out! Risks her life! Commits abortions! Commits horrors!" He gagged, clutched his heart, and ran from the room.

Paul, almost out of his head for fear of disgrace and prison,

… sat up all night in the chair. Near four—or perhaps later, for the buses were running—he walked into the hall. He hammered twice on Levy's door.

"Levy!"

No answer.

"Levy, do you hear me?" He kicked five distinct times on the door. He started to turn the knob but, at the last moment, decided not to. From the darkness behind the door might not Levy bring down a cane on his head?

"Levy—listen to me, Levy. You never open your mouth. You never in your life say one word to anybody. Never! I'll kill you, Levy. I'll strangle you to death! Never—understand, you filthy son of a bitch! I'll kill you and leave you for the rats! You filth!"

And that last word did not leave him; it hung suspended within the hollow of his being through the rest of the night, until at last it was white cold daylight.

Nor do Jews, elderly or young, have a corner on nastiness. The same day, Paul visits the young doctor who, apparently from the kindness of his heart, directed him to the abortionist:

Had everything worked out? Wife all right? Satisfied? Fine—he did not mean to pry. Only one had to check on Smitty. He fed the osteopath patients—almost one a month—but still it was wise to keep an eye on the fellow. Every once in a while Doctor Tom seemed to forget about slipping Dr. Esposito his few bucks. You know what I mean? Not an entirely professional group, osteopaths …

Most of the novel is a shuddering recoil against the horrors of human contact; for Letting Go is a novel about attachment, relationship, of which the intensest and most destructive instance is marriage. Paul and Libby make each other miserable in all the ways possible to husband and wife. By the end of the novel, Paul is impotent and Libby has settled into numbed and parasitic housewifery with an adopted child. Throughout the novel, Paul is helpless in practical matters, emergencies, love, anger, friendship; Libby is such a pitiable gorgon of stupid hysterical messiness that the reader can only wonder how any man could fall for her and stick with her:

"I think I'm going to go out this afternoon," Libby said, picking at her orange.

"Just dress warmly."

"Don't you want to know where I'm going?"

"Out. For a walk …" he said. "I thought you said you were going out."

"If you're not interested.

"Libby, don't be petulant first thing in the morning."

"Well, don't be angry at me for last night."

"Who said anything about last night?"

"That's the whole thing—you won't even bring it up. Well, I didn't behave so badly, and don't think I did."

"That's over and done with. You were provoked. That's all right. That's finished."

She did not then ask him who had provoked her; she's just began cloudily to accept that she had been.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"When?" Now she was petulant, perhaps because she no longer considered it necessary to feel guilty about last night…

Roth's talent for dramatizing at murderous length the most squalid and irresolvable quarrels, especially between husband and wife, is exercised with bleak frequency in the novel. If it isn't Paul and Libby, it's Gabe and Libby, or Gabe and Martha. Letting Go intends to be almost as much about a menage d trois—Paul-Libby-Gabe—as about a marriage; and in fact about four relationships that fail: Paul-Libby, Gabe-Libby, Paul-Gabe, and Gabe-Martha. The alternative to the success that eludes them is "letting go": madness, or impotence and despair. There are only two characters who do not seem created chiefly to be crammed into the gloomy design of the novel: Martha, who has enough animal vitality to enjoy herself when she can and to survive the wreckage with poise and humor; and Paul's Uncle Asher, the ancient Chorus, free outsider, who delivers the ancestral warning to his nephew before the marriage:

" … Paulie, kiss the girl, caress her, stick it right up in her, but for Christ's sake do me a favor and wait a year. You're an artistic type, a serious observer of life, why kill your talent? You'll sap yourself with worry, you'll die of a hard-on in the streets. Other women will tantalize you some day and you and your conscience will wrestle till you choke … Listen to Uncle Schmuck, will you? Things come and go, and you have got to be a receptacle, let them pass right through. Otherwise death will be a misery for you, boy; I'd hate to see it. What are you going to grow up to be, a canner of experience? You going to stick plugs in at either end of your life? Let it flow, let it go. Wait and accept and learn to pull the hand away. Don't clutch! What is marriage, what is it but a pissy form of greed, a terrible, disgusting ambitiousness …"

Uncle Asher makes his point much later too, for a chastened Paul possibly in sight of suicide:

"… what I'm in favor of is getting back in tune a little bit with nature. All this emphasis on charity and fucking. Disgusting."

"But you've always had women, Asher. You told me that too, remember? A Chinese woman and so on. That's all you talked about last time we met. You made it sound as though I was leaving a harem for marriage. Let's be serious, if we're going to have discussions."

"You misunderstood. Ass is no panacea. Not even the highest quality."

"Then why do you pursue it?"

"One, I got needs and prefer ladies to queers. Number two, I told you, I'm the child of the age. I want to understand what all the movies and billboards are about. Three, you still haven't got what I'm talking about. I'm talking about taking a nice Oriental attitude for yourself. Pre-Chiang Kai-Shek. Ungrasping. Undesperate. Tragic. Private. Proportioned. So on down the line. I only want to leave you with one thought, Paulie, because I've got to get out of here and I don't want to find you dead when I get back. Nobody owes nobody nothing. That's the slogan over the Garden of Eden. That's what's stamped on all our cells. Body cells, what makes us. There's your nature of man …"

Uncle Asher stands in the wings; but nobody in the action of the novel is susceptible to his philosophy of nonattachment. Indeed, the most substantial and admirable character in the novel is Martha Reganhart, who practices with spontaneous piety the doctrine of love and touch even at the price of pride, who has "a natural instinct for sharing pleasure"; the harassed, puzzled, hard-working, slovenly, man-hungry wise-cracking divorcee with two kids she worries about and a roomer to help pay the rent:

She planted a kiss on her son's neck and he drew a purple line across the bridge of her nose.

"Bang! Bang!" he shouted into her ear, and she left him to his drawing.

"What's the matter with your nose?" Sissy asked. "You look like you've just been shat upon."

"Could you control your language in my house?"

"What are you coming on so salty again for?"

"I don't want my children saying shat, do you mind? And put on a bathrobe. My son's earliest memory is going to be of your ass."

"Now who's filthy?"

"I happen to be their mother. I support them. Please, Sissy, don't walk around here half-naked, will you?"

The only love and passion in the novel is between Martha and Gabe, as on one occasion when Gabe is too ill for anything but pleasure:

"Oh Gabe," she said, "my Gabe—"

I left her there alone, just lips, just hands, and was consumed not in sensation, but in a limpness so total and blinding, that I was no more than a wire of consciousness stretched across a void. Martha's hair came raking up over me; she moved over my chest, my face, and I saw her now, her jaw set, her eyes demanding, and beneath my numb exterior, I was tickled by something slatternly, some slovenliness in the heavy form that pinned me down. I reached out for it, to touch the slovenliness—

"Just lie still," I heard her say, "don't touch, just still—"

She showed neither mercy then, nor tenderness, nor softness, nothing she had ever shown before; and yet, dull as I was, cut off in my tent of fever and fatigue, I felt a strange and separate pleasure. I felt cared for, labored over; I felt used …

The affair between Martha and Gabe develops so promisingly, in fact, that it takes all of Gabe's motiveless Angst, plus an outrageous trick of plot, to separate them forever and reinstate the novel's atmosphere of seamless wretchedness. For Roth is determined to keep everybody wretched, or to prove out wretchedness as the norm and pleasure as a passing aberration. He will use all his skill to show that nothing works.

The skill has protracted and damaging lapses. One of these has already been mentioned: Roth is never able to indicate why Paul marries Libby or stays married to her; or why Gabe, far more improbably, continues throughout the novel to find Libby fascinating. In general, the novel is weak on motivation: a weakness that would count little if it were not for Roth's insistence on the finicky motive-hunting by Gabe the sophisticated narrator. Gabe's "ironic" discriminations between chalk and cheese are as tedious and false as Nick Carraway's in The Great Gatsby; and Roth indulges him at length in his bad habit. As for Roth's own motive here, it may be that he is trying to achieve some distance from a subject too close for comfort; but he is a better novelist when he just gives up and hugs it to him unironically, letting the knifelike cross-purposes of his dialogue cut him up a bit.

Malamud and Bellow are in their fifties, each with an uneven but important oeuvre behind him; each, however, pretty clearly in need of new subjects now that the American Jew has disappeared into their novels. Roth is in his early thirties, a Wunderkind, having produced in his twenties a big novel that registers the disappearance of the American Jew not only into fiction, but into the featureless and solipsistic emotional landscapes of contemporary America. Something to have done in a first novel! Now, having put the headstone on the subject that he and Malamud and Bellow worked to death, he may be in the same fix as the others. Still it is difficult not to be hopeful about all of them, in the impasse to which their energies have rashly carried them. At least Bellow has finally given up on style; and, besides, been tempered into a wary respect for the women of America, those hard facts that Malamud and Roth also are acquainted with and astounded by.

The Jew is dead: Libby killed Paul; Pauline killed Levin; Madeleine killed Herzog. The Jew was done in by the American bitch who closed his ears against the admonitory ancestral voices. At his tomb three novelists meditate, trying to conceive an American sequel to the myth of Eden.

Bellow's first book after Herzog was Mosby's Memoirs & Other Stories, about which I wrote that "Bellow's astonishing eclecticism looks very odd in a collection: the stories are related to one another only in the sleight-of-hand virtuosity with which each one manipulates the special style that Bellow chooses for it. Every style of Bellow's suffers from a chronic chill of pedantry and remoteness except the Herzog style, which is probably as close as we'll ever get to hearing Bellow himself. The best, if a rather slight, story is the only one in the Herzog style, 'A Father-to-Be' … 'The Old System' is Augie March in a funereal mood; 'Looking for Mr. Green' is Depression naturalism, more supple than Farrell or Dos Passos; 'The Gonzaga Manuscripts' is the product of Bellow's unaccountable impulse to redo 'The Aspern Papers'; 'Leaving the Yellow House' may have compassionate intentions but it's an iceberg of a story, a demoralizing account of the nullity of a down-and-out old woman; 'Mosby's Memoirs' is in Bellow's latest brilliant, showy, dense, protective manner behind which the reader is not admitted."

Mr. SammIer's Planet, looking for a while rather like Herzog in late middle age, lacks the latter's electrifying hatred of its hero's enemies and so lacks everything. It is an earnest, nervous, inert jeremiad against contemporary America (materialism; the cult of revolutionary youth; Bellow's capital sinner the American woman, who this time is indicted for bad smells and alleged to be "smearing all with her female fluids"). It is a disappointing book. "I am extremely skeptical of explanations, rationalistic practices," austerely declares Mr. Sammler, Bellow's spokesman, pausing after two hundred pages of expository and rationalistic monologue, and about to wow a small rapt audience with his bookworm reasons for the world's troubles. The novel is at least unfashionable in a fashionable time, it disapproves of much; but its notions are defensive, despairing, and not very interesting ("Violence might subside, exalted ideas might recover importance"). Characteristically in Bellow's novels, his narrative keeps threatening to recede into allegory and opinion: in Mr. Sammler's Planet Auschwitz and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war are big ideas, pretexts for Hollywood flashbacks, but they are never events or foreshadowings of events; and the present is only the immediate pretext for the author's moral dyspepsia. Mr. Sammler is a seventy-two-year-old refugee: Bellow expects us to make every allowance for old age, foreignness, fussiness, platitude, and any other plausible defect in his protagonist. The author, however, is inexcusable, having finally condemned himself to his cosmos of Air-Wick (exalted ideas) and bad smells (reality).

I was impressed enough by When She Was Good, Roth's first book after Letting Go, to use it for the concluding exhibit in a review concerned till that point with French and American practitioners of the nouveau roman:

When She Was Good… is in effect a posthumous Dreiser novel, with much family-album verisimilitude ("Edward's bronchitis had lingered nearly three weeks") and some acutely observed American domesticity. Roth continues, clumsily and anachronistically, to be gnawed—as he was in that underrated novel Letting Go—by the problems of sin and responsibility. Why do destructive people behave as they do? How do they persuade themselves that they are good? How does it feel to be bad? Roth cares about such questions, stumbling along in the burlap sack of his prose:

This battle, too, she had fought and this battle, too, she had won, and yet it seemed that she had never in her life been miserable in the way that she was miserable now. Yes, all that she had wanted had come to be, but the illusion she had, as they drove home through the storm, was that she was never going to die—she was going to live forever in this new world she had made, and never die, and never have the chance not just to be right, but to be happy.

Roth can even, under the stimulus of a climactic scene, revive such questions for his readers, he can hear every vibration of the terrible small voice of righteousness confronting an unworthy adversary:

She got up and went into the bathroom. Into the mirror she said,

"Twenty-two. I am only twenty-two."

When she came back into the living room the radio was playing.

"How you feeling?" he asked.

"Fine."

"Aren't you all right, Lucy?"

"I'm feeling fine."

"Look, I didn't mean I'm going to publish a book even if I could."

"If you want to publish a book, Roy, publish a book!"

"Well, I won't! I was just having some fun. Jee—zuz." He picked up one of his family's old copies of Life and began leafing through it. He slumped into his chair, threw back his head and said, "Wow."

"What?"

"The radio. Hear that? 'It Might As Well Be Spring.' You know who that was my song with? Bev Collison. Boy. Skinny Bev. I wonder whatever happened to her."

"How would I know?"

"Who said you'd know? I was only reminded of her by the song. Well, what's wrong with that?" he asked. "Boy, this is really some Valentine's Day night!"

A little later he pulled open the sofa, and they laid out the blanket and pillows. When the lights were off and they were in bed, he said that she had been looking tired, and probably she would feel better in the morning. He said he understood.

Understood what? Feel better why?

Righteousness has its own sheer cliffs.

When She Was Good is, most of it, hopelessly old-fashioned, and it is an interesting novel. Why not? The novel, of all artifacts, remains the one least divisible from its artificer, whose idiosyncrasies and judgments may prevail over the demands of the genre itself. Roth's mind, besieged by archaic American drearinesses, is more interesting than Barthelme's or Burroughs'. Novels are too long, the novelist can't get away with gimmicks or momentary flashes; he has to disclose substance and continuity somewhere, perhaps in himself.

The most startling fact about Portnoy's Complaint, however, is Roth's absence from it. The feeble pun of the title is a portent: the book's organization is rudimentary; there are maybe a half-dozen amusing pages (some of the whacking-off rhetoric; several outbursts by The Monkey; Portnoy's attempt on the virtue of the tractor-sized kibbutz heroine); and the otherwise uninterrupted cornball-ethnic witlessness comes close to proving that "Philip Roth" is a clever pseudonym for this title page or all the others. "Doctor, please," cries Portnoy, "I can't live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown." It's a horrid fate all right, and Roth or "Roth" ought to wipe off the greasepaint and apologize.

Malamud continues to be an honorable and conscientious writer, even in so ambitious a book as The Fixer. But the best part of the book is the least ambitious, the long opening section, which creates and places the promisingly irritable and disillusioned hero among the commonplaces of Jewish experience in pre-1914 Eastern Europe. When Bok is arrested, the subject-matter abruptly changes from Yiddish to Russian: it's no disgrace that Malamud is not so competent as Dostoevsky was to prove on our nerves the whole metaphysical cycle of capture, terror, torment, endurance, and redemption; at any rate, Malamud is ambitious enough to try, and skilful enough to make the details (though never their historical resonance) convincing.