A New Life

>A New Life< is great writing! A thoughtful, intriguing romance: <br />page 237: Once she drew back back a lock of hair . . . and revealed an ear pinned like a jewel to her head . . . . Lord, thought Levin, how beautiful women are, and how hungry my heart is. <br />page 202: Pauline rubbed her wet eyes against his shoulder. "I sensed it. I knew who you were." <br />"I felt a new identity." <br />"You became Levin with a beard." <br />page 216: Love? Levin eventually sighed. Is it love or insufficient exercise? <br />. . . Consider once more her lank frame, comic big tootsies, nose flying, chest bereft of female flowers . . . . He wanted no tying down with ropes . . . (he) had to have room so he could fruitfully use freedom. If ecstasied out of his senses, he let down his guard . . . Lord help Levin! <br /> <br />In an enigmatic forward, Malamud quotes from >Ulysses< by James Joyce, "Lo, Levin leaping lightens . . ." <br />Come experience Levin's amazing journey! <br />

Bernard Malamud is known for creating deeply flawed characters with strong ideals, and Seymour Levin - known interchangeably as S, Sy, Seymour, Levin and Lev - the central character in this wonderful novel, is no exception. A thirty year old masters graduate, down on his luck, but with the backing of an NYU education, he lands a job as a college instructor in the English department of a fictional mid-western state (Cascadia) college. This opens up an interesting cast of characters who view him with a mix of interest, disinterest, partly an inferior, an activist/idealist (his beard suggests he is a radical in the year 1950 in the midst of red-baiting and community suspicion), a potential threat, an alien, an anomaly. Levin, "formerly a drunkard" (to quote the author) has deep seated problems and issues of self worth. He is a plain man, though definitely an idealist; however, one gets the sense early on that his idealism comes less from a passionate, inward set of convictions and more from a sense of inferiority, and a desire to find meaning in ideas. His activities and how quickly he reacts to the new environment are fascinating - he wastes no time getting inappropriately involved with a female student, sleeping with the wife of a trusting colleague or getting embroiled in the politics of the English department (here Malamud provides an interesting look at a college in a conservative town that values professional training at the expense of literature and learning) and being drawn into a myriad of ethical and moral dilemmas. Without spoiling the plot any further, Levin breaks every conventional rule in the book - this makes him less a sympathetic character and more someone the reader is almost glad to see suffer the fate he does. I would not have felt this way if I got the sense that Levin was fighting for something and doing it sensibly - while I love literature, the way Levin goes about seeking its elevation seems foolish and misguided. Perhaps more about ego and an attempt to feel worthy than out of a true love of books. This is in essence something of a morality tale, and if I had to get to the heart of what Malamud is saying here it would have to be that misplaced idealism - without moral or ethical standards - will destroy the person within. I found it to be both gripping and bleak at the same time, but surely one of my favorite Malamud novels (and I have now read them all, so will have to find a new author to stalk!). It seems that from the sparseness of the reviews here and from the seeming lack of recognition this book has received, it is one of his least known works. That is a shame because the characters and plot are fascinating; the themes are timeless (suspicion of someone who looks different, moral bankruptcy, clash of conservatism and radicalism, status quo versus change) and the writing is very good.

'A New Life' by Bernard Malamud is the fifth novel I've read by him and with each book I am further convinced of his genious. He was a master at the novel (not just short story). Though his works are funny they are also deeply humane and, from a literary standpoint, subtle. I can't think of anything more difficult in writing than subtlety. Time and again, while reading this book I'd have to pause and reread a line or paragraph because of his subtle and miraculous use of language. The main character, Levin, is somewhat of a comic hero, but there is deep truth in him. His life is regret and he wonders when he will actually begin living. Already thirty, an outcast from the east in a northwestern college town, Levin's new chapter of life is on vivid, often comic and sad display for the reader. Another masterpiece!

Jonathan Lethem's preface shouldn't be read first but last, as it--albeit subtly--gives away the ending for any reader who makes it to the latter third of the novel. While I did not support the choice made by the protagonist, Sy, at the end, and sympathized more than perhaps I was supposed to with the antagonist, I found this evocation of the Cold War period as spent at a cow college in a small town in the Northwest gripping and surprisingly convincing in its indirect narrative style, which mimics not only the patterns of thinking in Sy's mind, but springs off at times into Joycean reverie. I have only read Malamud's The Assistant, and that in college, so my pleasure at his plot became all the more pronounced when I found so much of the setting alarmingly familiar--I teach English too at a non-liberal arts college, run by number-crunching techies, so Sy's predicaments--although now I doubt if he could land his position without a PhD--stayed fresh despite happening half-a-century ago. Issues of academic freedom, nourishing of the soul, escape into nature and ideals vs. the mundane may be new material for those used to Malamud's urban explorations of often NY and Jewish characters, but here it all works. I was mildly intrigued that Sy's Jewishness never gains but one mention, near the end of the novel, but is assumed, I suppose, throughout as he is marked by his beard and his "East Coast" origins as an outsider all the time. The near-absence of religion and the substitution of a longing for nature, perhaps a Wordsworthian sort of wonder, permeates much of the lyrical passages interspersed with the more tormented episodes--which gain as the book lengthens. The book has a bit of slapstick and a lot of farce in the predicaments Sy gets himself into, but I can testify that much of Malamud's take on such an institution remains relevant today, in a much more constrained academic job market for such profs-to-be. Again, a measure of the skill Malamud brings is both the detachment the third-person p-o-v offers of Sy (who never leaves our sight) and the engagement with the other characters we see through his jaundiced eyes, and the fact, as I stated, that your sympathies may not be fully with Sy by the book's close.

Malamud's book is the story of a man who moves across the country to try a new life as a college instructor. As a college instructor myself, the politics he deals with rang true. I was mainly impressed, however, with the thoughts inside this characters head. I often read novels in which I come across something and think "No man I know would ever think this", but I never felt that way here. I didn't like the ending (I thought the character made a bad choice) but Malamud is under no contract to clear his endings with me first. A good solid read.