Malamud: The Still, Sad Music

Abstract

Any doubts we may have had about Bernard Malamud’s stature as a modern master should be dispelled by this collection of his stories. This personal selection of twenty-five stories presents Malamud at his best: as a writer of eloquent and poignant vignettes. Though Malamud has published seven novels, each one touched with his distinctive melancholy grace, the short story remains the purest distillation of his abiding Leitmotif: the still, sad music of humanity. Typically, the Malamud story is an epiphany of disappointment and failure, a document of the half-life — the shabby region of mediocre existence just a notch above pure disaster — bathed in the melodies of despair, the taut, concise adagios of woe. By and large, however, Malamud’s range of characters and situations has been too narrow to sustain longer constructions. Lacking variety and any feel for the architecture of sustained fiction, his novels hold the note of sorrow too long, until what had begun as a lamentation ends as a kvetch. But in the short story, Malamud achieves an almost psalm-like compression. He has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might also be thought a Jewish Chopin, a composer of preludes and nocturnes in prose.