Maloff, Saul 1922–

Maloff is an American editor, literary critic, and novelist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 33-36.)

There has been some speculation in psychological jargon that one must first find one's father before being able to reject him. With a new twist, to this insight—such as it is—Saul Maloff has written a novel ironically called "Happy Families." With the closest possible eye for detail and with perceptions that are sharpened to razor-edge, we are introduced to the American Family as a moribund institution. The emphasis, however, is on the father-daughter syndrome in our great society.

With a devastating irony, we are treated to a kind of epiphany—and a palimpsest too. Filled with unconscious reflections of a literary nature, we unmask layer upon layer of narration to produce an idea—and the idea is a simple one, though rather unpleasant. Truth, as Mr. Maloff indicates, is often unpleasant. And as we read on we learn—over and over again—that fathers with seventeen-year-old daughters have problems, to say nothing about the problems the seventeen-year-old daughters have with fathers…. It would seem that these young creatures are careless, insolent, flaunting, instinctual, mammary and fleshy, smoldering—and, in some cases, much more….

There is superb craftsmanship here as ideas come and go, that are fragmentary and elusive. Mr. Maloff has the ability to bring us into direct contact with the minutiae of life, its feel, and color, and smell, its nuance and humor. The characterization—especially of Mr. Kalb's boss—is superb. (p. 208)

Clara M. Siggins, in Best Sellers (copyright 1968, by the University of Scranton), August 15, 1968.

Happy Families … is actually less a novel than a long psychiatric nightmare conceived in despondency and executed in a kind of manic misery. The wish-fulfilling, therapy-begging ending is of a piece with the rest of the fantasies, oblique interior monologues, and shadowy comic encounters in the book: stuff that dreams are made of when the spirit is being torn apart on a torture rack of intolerable circumstance. But there is a not unwholesome fascination in staying with the author through his dark night of garrulous catharsis. We soon realize that Saul Maloff is not going to tell us much of a story, yet something very exciting emerges.

Kalb is the standard loser of much Midwestern or New York-based fiction since World War II. Herzog without the academic extras. Jonathan Baumbach's "man to conjure with," only in terms of a daughter instead of a son. Herbert Gold's Herbert Gold, but with one girl instead of two, and minus the acquired sophistication. To be sure, Kalb's head is full of literary references and camp (the book wouldn't be a bad cram text for an advanced degree in English or Popular Culture).

Samuel I. Bellman, "Incestuously Lusting Fathers," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1968 by Saturday Review, Inc.; reprinted with permission), September 7, 1968, p. 46.

The principal difficulty with Saul Maloff's intelligent and entertaining new novel [Heartland] is that the ground it explores has already been rather thoroughly plowed. Its central theme—that of the vaguely intellectual New York Jew set uncomfortably down on a corn-fed provincial campus—has been examined by, among others, Bernard Malamud in A New Life and John Updike in Bech. The bizarre ritual its protagonist encounters is out of The Golden Bough and bears striking if entirely coincidental similarity to the tale spun by the whilom movie actor, Thomas Tryon, in his current best-seller, Harvest Home.

Still Maloff is a novelist of skill and wit, and there is much to recommend in Heartland….

Maloff has described Heartland as...