Malamud's Cantata for Middle Age

...A surge of optimism and selflessness aerates the scenes where Dubin is talking to Maud or thinking about her, and in that ambience, the unvarnished truth is tolerable...

...By a perverse intuition, his wife has hired Fanny Bick, the Volkswagen girl, for part-time housecleaning...

...As if they were ourselves, we can recognize the helpless parents of our generation in the Dubins' hesitant overtures to their uncommunicative son and daughter...

...In the remarkable early stories, "The Seven Years," "The Magic Barrel," "The Last Mohican" (among the world's great short stories), Malamud wrote about people circumscribed by history, by class, by poverty...

...Not only is she a free spirit and practiced sex object who merrily tosses her yellow panties at her suitor and wears minidresses with her hair "attractively up and slightly messy, though the effect was splendid...

...Perhaps that is why Dubin's Lives, in spite of some magnificent writing (as in those frightening scenes when the hero loses his way in a blizzard or is attacked by a dog), is finally only a coal-gray cantata for middle age...

...Dubin does not so much fall in love with Fanny as borrow her youth, only to brood: "one paid for the pursuit of youth...

...Yet right here, just when his temperament is bothering us, the novelist's talent makes itself felt, performing a quite remarkable sleight of hand that has us seeing two Kittys—one cordial and appealing in her weaknesses, the other a frail phantom of her husband's complaints...

...Naturally, the affair is fraught with Malamudian humiliations: In an autumnal Venice ("canals encrusted with green sparkling light...

...Despite such respite and the author's effort to be faithful to the compensatory law of marriage, bone-chilling ebb replaced by heart-warming flow, we get the message that it is a state in which to bear and forbear rather than expect felicity...

...He makes such a tremendous outcry that we want to advise him to be more gracious in the face of the inevitable...

...For ever since his heartbreaking stories in The Magic Barrel, Malamud has been portraying, as if it were his destiny, the intractability of life exacerbated by the obstinacy of his characters...

...By the same token of mulish accuracy, he gives her credit where it is due, for a figure still attractive at 51, for being good with space and furniture, for ending a quarrel by quietly asking what he wanted for supper...

...He sucked on each juicy piece...

...In the best of marriages," explains Dubin to a curious Fanny, "you give what you can and get back as much or more...

...Christmas MALAMUD'S BS^e1 CANTATA FOR 1 fe MIDDLE AGE BY ISA KAPP w ? ? hen we first meet the hero of Bernard Mala-mud's meticulously observant but grueling new novel, Du-bin'sLives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 358 pp., $10.00), jogging through late-summer woodland near the foothills of Vermont, we give way to a slight attack of medieval enchantment...

...The biographer determined to be kinder to his life...

...Malamud towers over the playboys of modern fiction, massive and unbudgeable as New England rock...

...grieves a bewildered Kitty...

...Life was a trace of dark light in a gaseous entity, a white sail in an irradiated universal sea of loss...

...At second glance we see that he is no conquering hero, only a typical Malamudnik—confessional, awkward and prone to mild existential gloom...

...Readers who remain unmoved by Dubin in the throes of lust and remorse may find themselves close to tears when his daughter Maud tells him he has exaggerated their closeness, then belies her words by reading him a Keats poem that exactly represents his mood...

...Her senses were highly charged conductors...

...She was "overly intense, impatient under stress...

...What he makes it his business to deliver is grating, unalleviated veracity, and he is such a strong, self-propelled writer, so impervious to stylish currents, superficial contrivance, gloss, that we are often tempted to take his word...

...Older and more dyspeptic than his predecessors, Dubin is even more adept at self-punishment, frantically dieting, addicted to long walks in freezing temperatures...

...With the right people, it's a decent enterprise...

...Were we good parents or half-ass ones...

...Raw-nerved, eyes peeled for marital disjunction, Dubin mentally catalogues his wife's exasperating traits...

...buttercups...

...There is no doubt about his force and incorruptibility as an artist...

...Fretfully alert to blemish in body or spirit, he keeps in mind her long feet, lank hair, faded garden hat, annoying compulsion to sniff gas burners in case they are leaking...

...Lawrence, as alien a subject as he can find from his own rational mentality...

...It has been his ambition, in this whale of a novel, to swallow the Jonah of contemporary life whole, encompassing the appeal of Zen, draft evasion, cancer phobia, impotence, generation gap—all the woes of the past two decades...

...She has read and admired Dubin's biographies of Mark Twain and Thoreau, and will in time further impress him by getting high grades at NYU, becoming a diligent farmer in upstate New York and going on to study law...

...Kitty disliked body odors, abolished her own...

...D. H. Lawrence would have been appalled at this cheerless view...

...What levity Dubin's Lives can lay claim to is confined to the hero's protracted romp with Fanny, a comically idealized figment of the adulterous imagination...

...As his experience and stature have expanded—he has taught at several universities, lived in Italy, won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer and two National Book Awards—his focus has paradoxically turned inward, toward one man's gripes and frustration...

...Fanny, a child of the '60s, does embody a certain deja vu social reality as we watch her trying to improve herself, get close to nature, fathom but postpone marriage...

...He is working on a biography of D.H...

...Or more desperately: "He had entered the age of aging...

...Malamud has taken on the formidable duty of charting every small variation in the weather of marriage—predictable and unpredictable, balmy to harsh, stagnant to fresh...

...Instead of cutting an orange in quarters, he peeled it and stood in the morning-blue kitchen window, chewing it in pulpy sections...

...a blue haze of forget-me-nots...

...It is a kind of remorseless emotional mathematics meant, I imagine, to be ascribed to the hero, but certainly not inimical lo the author's way of looking at the world...

...Coming upon her, barefoot, swabbing the toilet bowl, he feels his "blood consciousness" rise: an erotic context that only Malamud, fanatical opponent of glamor, would dream of summoning up...

...The chunk of reality that preoccupies him most in this novel, indeed traumatizes him, is not lust, marriage or parenthood, but getting old...

...Like Frank Alpine (the young Italian who works for a poor Jewish grocer in The Assistant), S. Levin (the alcoholic New York teacher transplanted to a Northwest university in A New Life) and Harry Lesser (the novelist who tries to teach form and technique to a revolutionary black writer in The Tenants), they usually lament their wasted years and hope to make some change for the better...

...After the Middle Ages comes the Renaissance...

...A whiff of cheap perfume in a crowd set her teeth on edge...

...No sooner does a braless blond girl in an orange Volkswagen stop him to ask directions, than he loses his head and his mortifications begin...

...In addition, the neurotic psychology of the affair is all too real, with Fanny's compulsive questions about the wife, Kitty's willful innocence about the mistress, and Dubin's nervousness and dejection that go on for hundreds of pages...

...Malamud has narrowed to fine exactness the way a stranger's image becomes tantalizingly fixed in a mind susceptible to erotic obsession...

...That is to be expected...

...These are all classic gestures in a well-known ballet...

...Thus begins one of the most patient and inexhaustible documentaries on marriage and adultery in modern fiction...

...Wanting that much to be young was a way of hurrying time...

...What have I done to that child...

...Thus do writers like Peter deVries and Malamud sublimate the moral impulse: The wages of sin are a comedy of errors...

...hough his characters often have romantic aspirations, looking for love or artistic perfection where they cannot be found, the novelist is a realist to the hilt in assessing their chances...

...Worse, he believes in taking instruction from the lives he writes about, and advice like "We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh" calls, to a literal fellow like Dubin, for some prompt Lawrentian action...

...In one of the more benign interludes of the novel, he describes Dubin thawing out of winter melancholia over his unconsummated affair with Fanny...

...Malamud is our most dogged executor of the Job legacy in Jewish writing...

...Natural hosts to trouble, they gravitate toward hard, uncertain paths, volunteer for responsibilities they cannot shoulder, then marvel at their afflictions...

...The mixture of affection and insecurity on the part of the parents, affection and guard-edness on the part of the children, is perhaps the most authentic emotion in the book...

...More overtly Jewish, more parochial, he was nevertheless more concerned with the world outside himself...

...Yet he stayed with it...

...Is the grizzled 57-year-old biographer with "a bulge of disciplined belly" who is trotting briskly up a dirt road a contemporary Everyman determined to overcome danger for the sake of love...

...But for the most part, Malamud's honesty harps on the lumbering, ineffectual, elephantine touch in us, and we begin to long for a little of the mysterious Saul Bellow genius that makes every experience, even failure and rejection, become a foothold on life...

...expansive, enlivened—senseof island, senseof sea, of voyage") the moment of climax is interrupted by violent indigestion, and shortly thereafter Dubin loses Fanny to an ardent gondolier...

...Malamud is the more traditionally Jewish writer, still at home with martyrdom rather than power and glory...

...She knew before she knew...

...golden mustard in the green grass") and is at his ease in making the connection between the seasons in nature and in men...

...T .JL...

...if he overslept, he ran faster...

...And it is amusing to find the author incorporating the lingo of the younger generation (Fanny "digs" walking in the grass, literature "wipes her out") into the poker-voiced, graceless city prose we associate with him...

...That night he was struck by the splendor of the spring sunset bathing the hills brightly crimson, then mauve...

...Nonetheless, this part of the plot seems to have an obligatory borrowed and blue tone about it, possibly because Malamud is not really a master at romance, unless it is, as in his complex, picturesque "Fidel-man" stories, the romance of art...

...Perhaps he could find solace in a currently circulating birthday card that says, "Don't worry...

...He enjoyed fresh coffee, putting on a clean shirt, listening to Kitty up early playing her harp...

...Once the most urban of writers, he now indulges in a positive ecstasy of botanical naming and recognition ("dandelions were scattered in the fields...

...Yet an inescapable sense of depression envelops Dubin's Lives that may be a reflection of the strangely narrowing progress of his fiction...

...There are sinews here of the living truth, especially in the neighborhood of those feelings that come most naturally to Malamud—anxiety, regret, a sense of insufficiency...

...He plodded breathlessly . .. conscious of the weight of ascent, dismal cold, the unhappy task he had set himself...