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A huge disappointment as I’d briefly christened Malamud My Favorite Author after having recently read The Assistant and several short stories (“The Angel Levine”!). This is the book that won Malamud the Nobel, and I had to wonder why. It’s ideological, heavy handed, a hammer on your skull, bald-faced allegory, and miserable to read, pages and pages of suffering. I know there’s a grand point here, and it has something to do with the philosophy of Spinoza (which I haven’t read), God’s betrayal of the Jews after WWII, the reordering of one’s worldview after Evil has shown its face and won, the attempt to locate spirituality and morality in a world without God, the slow glimmer of revelation that Jewishness is not in the end really Chosenness in any sense that can improve your life. I love these themes, but they come across better, for me, in a treatment of an old Jew in New York finding God in Harlem, a Jewish family trusting an untrustworthy Italian goy, an encounter between spiritually and morally flawed characters from colliding cultures who will each find redemption in ways that will surprise you. Malamud’s other works, like Flannery O’Connor’s, embody both apostasy and a deeply religious and redemptive view of the world; they are about a spirituality that needs no God. I love that. I know these themes are in this tome as well but I still don’t get it. Can anyone explain to me why The Fixer is considered Malamud’s greatest work?
