Malamud: The Forgotten
by Daniel Septimus • December 10th, 2007 4:22 PM
Category: Culture
From Lee Siegel’s NYT review of the new Bernard Malamud biography by Philip Davis:
Paradoxically, the farther he traveled from his familiar environment, the more confidence he seemed to acquire in returning to it in his fiction. And the more deeply he returned to his past in his imagination, the more confident he felt in strange new places. Though narrowly identified with “Jewish” writing, Malamud seemed to consider his own Jewishness as less an inherited tradition than a portable ethos, a means of accommodating the larger world outside his inherited traditions.
And:
…sometimes Davis isn’t defensive enough — particularly when it comes to Malamud’s faded status among the Jewish writers and critics who made the reputations of Bellow and Roth. Like an embarrasing old uncle, Malamud is barely referred to these days. On those few occasions when he is publicly admired, tribute usually comes in the form of sentimental commentary from younger, self-consciously Jewish writers, whose parochial picture of Malamud ironically confirms the denigrating comments Roth made a generation ago. Far more frequently, however, you find critics celebrating Bellow and Roth, above all, for their intelligence, and never mentioning Malamud.
One Response to “Malamud: The Forgotten”
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Daniel Septimus
Member Since: Sep 2005 Posts: 64
Responding to Davis’ point about Bellow and Roth getting more attention than Malamud, Steve over at the blog Jewish Literary Review writes (very sensibly):
“If you were to ask me, I don’t think it’s a matter of people not liking Malamud or liking those other writers better. I think he gets less attention because he’s been dead for more than two decades.
On the other hand, Bellow just died in 2005 and Roth still puts out a book a year while he awaits a Nobel prize.
That may sound simple, but it’s the most obvious reason. “