D. Keith Mano on Malamud, Forster, Warren in Lejeune on Randolph Churchill Witonski on Jean-Franç ois Revel and Robert Coles

The Tenants By Bernard Malamud Farrar, 230 pp., $6.95 Maurice By E. M. Forster Norton, 256 pp., $6.95 Meet Me in the Green Glen By Robert Penn Warren Random House, 376 pp., $7.95 Bernard Malamud, E. M. Forster, Robert Penn Warren—something for everyone. A balanced ticket: Jewish, British, Southern (well, Border State at least). A fascinating convocation of traditions, one living, one honorably dead, one in an unpleasant state of rigor mortis.

The Tenants. Give me a page of Malamud in Braille and I can recognize it; also my fingers will laugh, Malamud’s style is the most distinctive and efficient being written in English today. It is a style and an accented voice. It is pared of unnecessaries; of article adjectives, connectives, relative clauses. A grumpy, grunting, hopeless voice, packed with the humor of desperation. His vocabulary is the vocabulary of informal speech: there are none of Bellow’s or Updike’s exoticisms. Malamud does mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on cliches; he does it not occasionally but a thousand times per novel. Malamud is all easiness and power.

The Tenants By Bernard Malamud Farrar, 230 pp., $6.95 Maurice By E. M. Forster Norton, 256 pp., $6.95 Meet Me in the Green Glen By Robert Penn Warren Random House, 376 pp., $7.95 Bernard Malamud, E. M. Forster, Robert Penn Warren—something for everyone. A balanced ticket: Jewish, British, Southern (well, Border State at least). A fascinating convocation of traditions, one living, one honorably dead, one in an unpleasant state of rigor mortis.

The Tenants. Give me a page of Malamud in Braille and I can recognize it; also my fingers will laugh, Malamud’s style is the most distinctive and efficient being written in English today. It is a style and an accented voice. It is pared of unnecessaries; of article adjectives, connectives, relative clauses. A grumpy, grunting, hopeless voice, packed with the humor of desperation. His vocabulary is the vocabulary of informal speech: there are none of Bellow’s or Updike’s exoticisms. Malamud does mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on cliches; he does it not occasionally but a thousand times per novel. Malamud is all easiness and power.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.