Who writes stories like this anymore? Who aspires to? In the fifties and sixties, Malamud’s talent for giving workaday sufferings and shortcomings the cast of a fable made him the quintessential postwar American writer his work was a reminder that the degradations of the past, particularly for Jews, were not long past. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate.” “That’s how it goes,” he writes early in the story. The arrival of a talking black bird in “The Jewbird” conveys both a sense of wonderment and a caution that reality is about to come crashing down. They remind us of life’s strangeness and the inexplicability of God’s will. The conclusions of Malamud stories are often spiritual but rarely redemptive. Consider the graduate student whose efforts to research art in Rome are stymied by his inability to find a suitable apartment in “Behold the Key,” or the young man trapped in his room by his promise to consume a stack of books in “A Summer’s Reading,” or the ballplayer shot and disabled on the cusp of fame in The Natural, or the man exasperated by a faith healer’s evasions in “The Silver Crown.” Malamud protagonists are forever being held back, locked out, or stifled. There’s a tendency, if not a formula, in Malamud’s fiction to invest humanity with a spiritual melancholy. “Not for the first time I was seeing a Malamud story unfold,” the critic Alfred Kazin observed.
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