Books in Brief

Idiots First, by Bernard Malamud (Farrar, $4.50). Eleven stories and a fragment of a play by a satirist as acid as they come. Mr. Malamud specializes in the ingrown mind, its ridiculous half-wisdom and its propensity to stumble splay-footed into pity and terror. “Idiots First” and “The Jewbird” are modern Jewish folktales with haunting resonances. “Still Life” and “Naked Nude,” chapters, apparently, from a scrapped novel about an American painter in Rome, contain enough high jinks to drive away the severest melancholy, and yet, like all of Mr. Malamud’s work, take their pratfalls in the very face of tragedy. Only a man who values the dignity of life could look at it so brutally warped by stupidity. But stupidity, these stories show, is life’s condition itself, the ruins of what wisdom we can command in collision with the equally short wisdom of others. Mr. Malamud’s “idiots” are. only people, and they might do better if they thought instead of loved, planned a little instead of leaping headlong, or had recourse to some mode of behavior other than their automated sass. The disturbing thing is that they’re all good people, even the worst, and the entire book pops with the slapping of faces and the cracking of heads. The art in which these transparent stories is cast is the time-perfected anecdotal genius of Jewish humor, as wildly exaggerated as it is laconic. Yiddish wit is the most articulate outrage we have had, except for Mark Twain’s and Henry

MIX a PINCH of CLASS and a DAB of METAL and BAKE in a MODERATE OVEN

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Idiots First, by Bernard Malamud (Farrar, $4.50). Eleven stories and a fragment of a play by a satirist as acid as they come. Mr. Malamud specializes in the ingrown mind, its ridiculous half-wisdom and its propensity to stumble splay-footed into pity and terror. “Idiots First” and “The Jewbird” are modern Jewish folktales with haunting resonances. “Still Life” and “Naked Nude,” chapters, apparently, from a scrapped novel about an American painter in Rome, contain enough high jinks to drive away the severest melancholy, and yet, like all of Mr. Malamud’s work, take their pratfalls in the very face of tragedy. Only a man who values the dignity of life could look at it so brutally warped by stupidity. But stupidity, these stories show, is life’s condition itself, the ruins of what wisdom we can command in collision with the equally short wisdom of others. Mr. Malamud’s “idiots” are. only people, and they might do better if they thought instead of loved, planned a little instead of leaping headlong, or had recourse to some mode of behavior other than their automated sass. The disturbing thing is that they’re all good people, even the worst, and the entire book pops with the slapping of faces and the cracking of heads. The art in which these transparent stories is cast is the time-perfected anecdotal genius of Jewish humor, as wildly exaggerated as it is laconic. Yiddish wit is the most articulate outrage we have had, except for Mark Twain’s and Henry

MIX a PINCH of CLASS and a DAB of METAL and BAKE in a MODERATE OVEN