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The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1966)

Going to the heart of the matter

by
Boris Fishman
September 17, 2013

“[The tea] tasted bitter and he blamed existence.” Is it necessary to write of the Old World’s wry melancholy after this sentence, from Malamud’s epic account of a shtetl Jew’s moral awakening after a false accusation of blood libel? (“Who invented my life?” goes another immortal line.) Keep your sybaritic Rothian heat, your Bellovian prolixity and self-scratching cerebralism, and give me the wilted flesh (and blood), the bone-rattling cold, the granite-like prose of a Malamud novel. Malamud is slipping from this sacred Jewish triumvirate, and unjustly so: As The Fixer reminds us, Roth and Bellow are mortal; Malamud is the Bible.

Boris Fishman is the author of the novels Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, A Replacement Life, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes.

Boris Fishman is the author of the novels Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo and A Replacement Life, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes.