Having now read the first three of Bernard Malamud's eight novels, I am less than halfway to knowing him as a novelist. Already I have developed a strong affinity for him. He is drawn to creating stories of how men acquire wisdom through suffering, also a major concern of my father's, and you could say I was raised within a Christian interpretation of that theme. Malamud's was a Jewish viewpoint but I have been surrounded by Jewish people all of my life. It all adds up to feeling comfortable with Malamud.Not that his protagonists are ever comfortable. They suffer, they have a lack of luck in life and a tendency to dither about most things. S Levin, a thirty year old teacher from New York City with a past soiled by excessive drinking, has been hired as an instructor at a small private college in the Northwest.Levin sees the new job as a chance to start over and make something of his life. Though he has given up alcohol, he still harbors the traits that drove him to drink. Before long he has made enemies on campus and fallen into a relationship with the wife of his immediate superior.The sense of impending doom begins in Chapter One and continues up to Levin's decisions and actions in the final chapter. Since the reader does not know the outcome of those decisions and actions, I felt he was most likely still doomed. Malamud's particular genius is to keep the reader hoping for Levin's success despite every wrong move he makes. Exquisitely torturous, as any good novel should be, but so close to the human condition where now and then a guy gets a break.I have read a good share of campus novels, of which A New Life is one. A college or university setting provides a good microcosm and I suspect Malamud had read some campus novels himself because he covers the major tropes of professional conflict, intellectual competition, town vs gown, and the insularity that leads to immorality amongst the professors, students, and locals. He covers a broader array of life than he did in The Natural or The Assistant. That may be because of the woods and fields surrounding his fictional Oregon town and the range of issues both personal and political that Levin confronts. Though he writes with a less precise focus than the troubles of a ball player or a struggling small shopkeeper in a big city, A New Life is an expansion into bigger questions of what make a whole life successful.
A well-written and well-observed novel—it's by Malamud, after all—but it doesn't really add up to much. Sex, adultery, department politics. It feels like an academic novel written by a man in the 1950s, which is exactly what it is.One redeeming factor—an interesting account of comp's second-class status in English departments, back in 1950 or so.Heres what John O. Lyons says about it in his 1962 The College Novel in America:"Malamud is a writer of great talent and this novel has some impressive moments when it deals with landscapes or with the hero's involvement with the wife of a shallow colleague, but the satire on the anti-intellectualism of a Western state agricultural college tends to come down to beating a sick dog" (161).Unfortunately, Lyons is right.
What do You think about A New Life (2004)?
I can't remember how I came across this book. It was written in the early 60's, and it's about a new English instructor at a small college in the Pacific northwest. As I first began reading the book I was rather interested in being immersed in the cultural mores of that time, but as it turned out, things didn't seem all that different from the present. I was also interested at first in the myriad mysterious plot lines that teased, but these didn't really pan out either. That is to say, I didn't really feel that Malamud really delivered. The writing is fine (though at odd times he waxes poetic, which I found a little jarring), but the action is watery, with no real direction. The end is most unsatisfying. In general, I felt as I might if I was putting out a really good effort to like a not-very likable new colleague only to become even more disgusted with him as time went on. In the end, I was disappointed in the main character. He let me down. Why, Malamud, why? Why this miasmic character? What is the point? And is your name M'LAMmood or MALaMOOD, or are you perhaps Mud-dy instead of Mood-y? So many questions.
—Suzy
I don't share your sympathy for Levin. I was glad to see the end of the book and amazed that he ended up with Pauline and the kids, but I didn't view this as a happy ending at all.
—Marla Seidell
There’s not much to the protagonist or the story, and there’s not much meaning, either. All there is is wonderful writing and one constant: you never know where the story or the protagonist is going, because he has no idea what he will do next. He’s a man with little integrity, little decency even, but he likes to take principled stands. He’s a mess, but somehow the novel is anything but a mess, although I suppose it is a mess, at that.This is why this is not considered one of Malamud’s great novels. And it’s not great. What is great is that he pulls it off, that only he could have done it.
—Robert Wechsler
