Doomed by a Device

...All are recognitions that the confrontation involving the last human comes not only on a deserted island in the destroyed world, but in its way and in its time to each of us...

...He doesn't need the tricks of the trade...

...Calvin Cohn, the human survivor, is a schlemiel, a well-intentioned, intelligent bumbler, naive enough to overlook the hopelessness of his situation...

...Sparse drama reminiscent of biblical narrative has always been Malamud's strength...

...The altogether plausible chimps are the raw material for the new world...

...Cohn becomes Isaac, and the myth is inverted so that the sons slay the father—anthropology rather than theology...

...So he climbed the stone mountain in his bare feet, holding the split wood against his chest...

...Without the world only a ship away, Crusoe, too, would have become a character in a joke rather than in a novel...

...Malamud understands them, and there has been so much information about signing chimps that sentient beasts seem less astonishing than recent microchimp technology...

...The destroyed world is a regular feature of myth...

...He was insufficient to himself...

...The Ten Commandments, the Kaddish, the Seder, are merely window dressing...

...Up bobs the scientist to find himself stranded on an island with only a few chimpanzees...

...More about that in the near future...

...Reviewed by Max Apple Author, "The Oranging of America," "Zap" In his latest novel, Bernard Mal-amud's characteristic witty, elliptical style—largely absent in Dubin's Lives?returns with its old vigor...

...Some blame it on poisoned consciousness, caused for some chemical reason, by our lunatic genes running wild...

...Talking chimps are believable...

...I think I know but I would like you to say so.' "'Pong,'" grunts the chimp, refusing to answer Cohn...

...This attempt encompasses the hopeless quest that Malamud has so wonderfully created in past short stories...

...Buz,' said Cohn, 'you are my beloved son tell me where we are going...

...Perhaps lurking in God's Grace is another perfect story that only Malamud could write, stripped of the explanations of how the chimpanzees speak, the lectures and theeasy trappings of religion...

...Neither Tolstoy nor Dosto-evsky, not the bard himself, could baldly summarize human history...

...or a phrase like Susskind's in "The Last Mohican" when the Jewish beggar tells the would-be-art critic that the Holy Land makes him constipated...

...A "dead" man, a living "joke" from the moment he emerges from the depths, he is also distinguished from Crusoe and the many other fictional island survivors by his spiritual undertaking to educate and "civilize" the chimps...

...Yet in God's Grace the teacher, the seasoned pro, the master fell for the plot...

...If Cohn wants to establish a Jewish world, then he can't use religion merely as a set, a prop for the chimpanzees...

...Love is not a popular phenomenon...

...Rather than spending so much time on pedagogical matters, Cohn needs brevity, one speech maybe, on the order of Ulysses in TroilusandCressida ("Take but degree away...

...I read it every few years to remind myself of a kind of literary perfection...

...A group of undergraduates brainstorming about what to produce for next week's creative writing class would surely come up with the "last man on earth" saga...

...Art and literature and theology are some of the handmaidens of the myth, as well as its disguises...

...When he does explain, the theology of God's Grace is thin...

...Rather than a dramatic gesture, a phrase, an image, Cohn gives a lecture: "Cohn then sketchily recounted Freud's work and to prove it apt began summarizing certain aspects of human history, not excluding major wars fought and other useless disasters...

...Strangely, the problem is not the chimpanzees, it's the man...

...Cohn has none of their majestic innocence...

...these early Malamud characters are among the great seekers of our literature...

...I kept wondering why he chose the burden of such a worn-out motif...

...Malamud in a few stunning pages shows us some of this confusion, this groaning of earth and nature...

...Anyway, in all those ages he hardly masters his nature enough to stop the endless slaughter...

...No longer do we have "simply" a matter of survival or the destruction of the world...

...There is no mention of the previous two days of anguish...

...At stakein Isaac's life is the survival of trust, the covenant, the agreement between man and God that life is not hopeless...

...The problem is nature, not society...

...In Plato's Atlantis, the civilization fell as successive generations were removed from their divine origins...

...But the tale of Abraham and Isaac moves the possibility of destruction to a more complex design than Malamud's premise allows...

...Certainly the superb conclusion contains intimations of this...

...In Mimesis Erich Auerbach called attention to how the book of Genesis omits the details of what passed between father and son once Abraham received God's instructions...

...Cohn, supposedly a former rabbinic student, seems more like a Hebrew school dropout...

...Leo Finkle in search of a bride, Fiddleman looking for a manuscript and wondering "whyisart...

...On the third day" Abraham lifts his eyes...

...Partly because this is a sustained effort, a novel, Cohn's project often turns intoa kind of comic-pastoral philosophy class...

...Such lectures, even in Cohn's rich comic setting, do not illuminate the human condition nearly as much as they reveal how quickly the grand issues can sound stale...

...Malamud is faced with an insurmountable difficulty here, again stemming from the premise of Cohn on the island...

...All I can imagine is that he did it just to see if he could...

...His power is visionary, arising from the primary imagination where, of course, chimps can talk, where man always confronts God...

...Disease, death and despair are what people encounter in everyday life...

...Anyway, man doing a not-so-hot job, by and large, in his relations to other men—he loves only finger-deep...

...In Coming Issues Charting americas This is a flaw only because Malamud allows the novel to be preoccupied with explanation...

...The promise to "be fruitful and multiply" is no less a promise to Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother, equally an inheritor of the earth, but "a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man's hand against him...

...Cohn has no possibility of rescue...

...God's Grace begins with a quotation from Robinson Crusoe, "I came upon the horrible remains of a cannibal feast," although Cohn has none of Robinson Crusoe's solid faith in his environment...

...Talks and talks but the real thing goes only finger-deep...

...Also implicit in God's Grace are the "Nephilim" of Genesis, the offspring of "the sons of God and the daughters of men...

...Still, the quest-ers—those Malamud characters seeking brides and art and new lives—are fueled by the myth of Isaac...

...In the midst of the tragic mileu there is man—aschlemiel, a rabbinic student, a Jewbird, out hunting for what Malamud once called a "new life...

...Too science fictiony," say the wiser old hands, "too contrived, too cute, too predictable...

...Given this enormous encumbrance, it is amazing that Malamud carries off the story as well as he does...

...Malamud the fabulist doesn't have to explain...

...The dimensions that Malamud pursues are theological, thus fable is his realism...

...Man had innumerable chances but was—in the long run—insufficient to God's purpose...

...But there is a flaw so deep and central in the conception of God's Grace that not even the wonder of Malamud's prose can redeem it...

...He even tries to start a new world with them until finally they turn on him...

...There can be a lot of good stuff about how he teaches the chimps to talk...

...It appears sometimes in exotic form like Kafka's dung beetle in The Metamorphosis, although most often in the gestures of mundane life?what Joyce called "epiphanies," what Virginia Wolf called "illuminated moments," terminologies as much theological as literary...

...It is easy to read the human past as a history of Ishmaelites...

...Crusoe is a materialist, enduring the struggle on the island so that he can be rescued back into the world...

...This book is an "idea," not a dramatic discovery...

...By excluding all hope for Cohn, the circumstances of the plot have reduced the fable to farce...

...In that story Malamud indirectly said more about art and literature and clarity and scholarship and pedantry and inspiration than would seem possible in so few pages...

...You can almost hear the excited sophomore talking: "Suppose there's this scientist deep in the ocean in one of those tiny one-man subs, and while he's there the earth gets blown away...

...His island, even the workings of his mind are only superficially Jewish...

...This novel suggests so much of what is mythic that I hunger for a more genuine encounter...

...Malamud is one of the few writers whose neighborhood is myth...