Cheryl Miller has an interesting article in this month’s Commentary. Reviewing a new biography of Bernard Malamud, Miller takes the opportunity to consider the decline in his reputation. At one time Malamud was numbered among the most eminent of American novelists and often grouped with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as exemplary of a new and exciting mainstreaming of Jewish-American fiction — the Hart Schaffner and Marx of the American novel, as Bellow quipped, referring to the famous men’s clothier.

Miller dates Malamud’s decline from a harsh critique by Philip Roth that apeared in the New York Review of Books in 1974, in which Roth faulted Malamud especially, Bellow much less so, for writing fiction burdened by Jewish ethicism and morality. Miller argues that Malamud’s emphasis on guilt, conscience, self-sacrifice, resignation, and so forth, put him at odds with the burgeoning culture of untrammeled personal freedom that arose after the Sixties, and was of course vastly different from Roth’s own wildly offensive and transgressive themes. She intimates further that the fact that the older writer’s concerns have become unfashionable is more of a judgment on us than upon him.

This is an intriguing thesis, but I would suggest that Malamud’s decline is due not so much to the fact that such qualities ceased to be compelling in our countercultural culture, but that the kind of resignation that Malamud began to portray, especially when he stopped writing about the old, colorful immigrant world that he had grown up in and started writing about modern America, was an especially dreary and depressing surrender to the grinding grayness of life.

There is a kind of deliberately and willfully fashioned old-world restrictiveness in Malamud that undercuts any sense that moral choice, self-sacrifice, and the like can actually be buoyant and bracing. Maybe we are not entitled to tragedy with a happy ending — as one Hollywood producer described what American audiences want — but Malamud’s later novels are often not even tragic, just bleak. If Roth was the unbuttoned libertine, and Malamud the repressed moralist, Bellow in a way was the happy medium, managing to show moral decency and the consequences of license and selfishness, but at the same time discovering the joy, sparkle, and renewal in everyday life in a way Malamud evidently could not. I have read The Assistant with college classes, and while the students enjoyed it to a degree and found it a compelling enough read, they were put off (and I think I was too when I looked at it more closely) by the idea that the young protagonist does so much to remake himself and is given so little reward for doing so.