Bernard Malamud (1914–1986)

The Assistant is a book you brood over after finishing, because the questions its characters ask—what does it mean to be a Jew?—and the questionable actions they take—working for a man you have robbed at gunpoint, having sex with a woman you have just rescued from being raped—are the powerful relics of purpose-driven writing, of a time when books were serious examinations of some aspect of society, rather than formulaic accumulations of ideology.

Bernard Malamud intertwines the lives of two down-on-their-luck characters, Morris Bober, the Jewish owner of a failing grocery store in Brooklyn, and Frank Alpine, a drifter whose tenuous connection to the grocery store, its owner and his family devolves over time as the truth behind his motivation for helping out at the store is slowly revealed. Bober, as the archetypal Jew, struggles to overcome the harms inflicted on him by an unfair world; Alpine, haunted by images of Saint Francis of Assisi, struggles to overcome the self-inflicted harms resulting from his own poor choices.

The Assistant plays the boredom of working in a store where hours pass without a single customer and the slow process of wooing a reluctant woman against sudden, seemingly Deus ex machina acts of criminality and violence as the push and pull on Frank as he works out who he is. The use of an omniscient third-person narrator is particularly effective, subtly providing the reader multiple perspectives to highlight the contrasts between not just Bober and Alpine but also what each character of the novel portrays.

The Assistant is ultimately a redemption story which focuses on the worthiness of faith, regardless of whether one is rewarded, while leaving unresolved what Frank gains in converting to Judaism, relinquishing the metaphorical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he has taken in choosing to run Bober's store for a life of suffering implied through Bober's example.… (more)

Reason Read: TIOLI, ROOT

I received only the short story The Magic Barrel and that is what I am reviewing. The story is of a young man who has been busy in college and has no social life. He contacts a marriage broker, Salzman to remedy this problem. Salzman offers a young window (rejected), an older lady, school teacher, and a young girl with a lame foot. Finkler rejects all of these. He eventually agrees to meet the school teacher and comes to the realization that he has never loved any one even God. Later he finds a small picture of a young girl that he falls in love with and insists that she is the one. Salzman tells him that she is not the one. Later he agrees to let them meet (he is her father) and the girl is dressed in a red dress and white shoes. Her father is behind the wall saying the prayer of the dead. The ending is ambiguous. Is this girl trouble, is this the new generation of Americans, or was it a trick of the father to marry off his daughter.… (more)