God's Grace

...he lectures Her on Leviticus and Deuteronomy and what Torah has to say about such abominations...

...Earlier Cohn, sorrowing for the desolated globe, had railed at God, Job-like...

...Forsaken and alone in all the world, he must learn to fill it with the infinite details of teeming creation and abide a while in what amounts to his own newly created universe...

...and of other living things, his sidekick Buz, an experimental chimp on the same ship, fluent in English and comfortable with abstract ideas though he has slight trouble with some vowels...

...and Cohn is Buz's "Dod...

...The colony prospers, flourishes...

...Virginal, she offers Cohn her purity...

...The beast within will not yield up its nature, no matter what the inducements...

...God's purpose...

...and that island, like Defoe's, must seem man's last possible residence on earth, a forbidding place made habitable by ingenuity as well as necessity, and for its allotted span even comfortably domestic, after a fashion, by suitable companionship...

...it is a thoroughly serious novel, and a beautifully imagined one, by our reigning fabulist...

...lectures them on ethics, tries hard and lovingly to make something out of them...

...God had not taken kindly to Conn's impertinence, and withdrew His presence, whether out of boredom or annoyance who can ever say...

...Gradually they fall in love, plight their troth, she conceives a female child, eventually their daughter Rebekah, who, Cohn hopes, will in time prove progenitrix to a new and superior breed, half-human, half-chimp, all decent and kind, generous and good, capable of living in peace with the whole of creation, deserving of life and its infinite bounties...

...The risks of such a conception are evident at once, to the most innocent eye...

...More likely God's absentmindedness, Cohn concludes .- an oversight or sheer indifference...

...Chimps bearing such names as Saul of Tarsus and Luke, Esau, and Melchior...

...Talking chimps?, A gorilla with a weakness for Hebrew liturgical music and ritual...

...together they make a life of it on this miraculously fertile island paradise bursting with diverse fruit trees...

...If Malamud can't help, in moments of exuberance, carrying the joke a mite too far, he is never self-indulgent to the point of substantially marring or diminishing texture, tone, moral weight...

...Mary Madelyn and Calvin Cohn - one braces oneself to say this but must say it nevertheless - do fall in love...

...Mary Madelyn in estrus - always a lady she hates the word "heat" - flees from swinish, rutting Esau and the others who can only "think of one thine...

...Cohn conducts a Passover seder for his family chimps, really a beautiful, moving ritual feast, substituting the at-hand for the ritual foods prescribed by law and custom...

...Cohn does see the union and its fruit (and so, crazily, do we), as a possible evolutionary leap into a future of unprecedented splendor...

...Ah, but it is not meant to be...

...Eventually, they are joined by a gorilla named George and a small band of resident chimps, among them Mary Madelyn, a charmer if there ever was one - but also by Esau, the self-appointed Alpha Ape, more like a fascist pig and an anti-Semite to boot - a cannibal and rapist in his stony heart...

...She is "Juwiet" (she has trouble with the letter "1" and Cohn has read her Act I of the play), he Romeo...

...This is the way the world ends...

...And so, by God's inadvertence - or purpose: of Him who thunders I AM THAT I AM it is best not to ask - life is granted a second chance...

...When George - yes, the sullen, indwelling gorilla, George - chants the Kaddish - the awesome prayer for the dead - the unbearable pain is ours, it is our most grievous loss, our inconsolable grief, as Calvin Cohn, our only descendant and remaining voice, our son, our Isaac, is made a sacrificial offering to a silent, absent, indifferent God...

...prayerful hopes are not enough, given the nature of things...

...Love encompassing carnal knowledge between kinds...

...Saul Maloff IN ORDER.that Bernard Malamud's cautionary tale of the end of the world have its intended effects, the magical island of its setting and its strange cast of characters must be made to seem not only plausible but exactly right - inevitable, emerging from the nature of things as it was conceived in the Beginning by the sometimes disheveled mind of Malamud's God...

...But God's Grace is nothing of the kind...

...Is that what he thinks she is - a beast...

...What I said, let me repeat, is that Mary Madelyn, the darling little chimp and only fecund female, and Calvin Cohn, the Jewish paleologist and last man alive at the end of days, "gradually fall in love, plight their troth" and generate a daughter who may prove in the fullness of time mother of a new and perfect species, homo ethicalis...

...Terribly hurt she sulks...

...and after a brief, coerced sojourn in the light, it reverts to type, our type...

...Of homo sapiens the only survivor is Calvin Cohn, a paleologist who had been at the bottom of the sea on a scientific expedition when the Day of Devastation, as the consummate nuclear holocaust is called, occurred - an event followed closely by the Second Flood...

...In Malamud's tragic vision - the phrase does not seem in the least grandiose - the disabling flaws are lodged too deep...

...and therein lies the extraordinary critical problem with Malamud's eschatological fable...

...Cohn assimilates them gratefully into a working society of fruit-gatherers and cultivators of rice...

...This is the way the world ends, and there will be no second chance...

...and Malamud is no innocent - he has considered to the minutest degree the risks entailed: archness, cute-ness, playfulness exceeding permissible limits, the pleasantries of a tale fit for the kiddies only, a didactic story about talking beasties with charming eccentricities of speech making them all the more adorable, animated cartoons straight out of some Disneyland...

...a peacable kingdom worthy of God's grace does seem within reach of the odd assortment of peculiar characters assembled on the magical island somehow spared the universal desolation resulting from man's radical and ineradicable iniquities - a Utopian community based on the lovely idea that exploitation and aggrandizement are not inevitable features of social life, that the ancient dream of cooperation and mutual aid, peace and freedom and loving kindness, is after all possible...

...Buz teaches them English, Cohn the history of the vanished world, its works and days, its failures and sins up to the moment when God, who had had more than enough of the world, smote it hip and thigh...

...Buz is like a beloved son to Cohn...