The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


"Pain was for poor people. [...] Everything to him who has."

It is a challenge to review Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1957), an acclaimed novel, virtually an "American classic." For instance, Time magazine included it in its list of "100 best English-language novels published since 1923," yet I have been totally unable to appreciate the novel, even if I admire the author's human-centered message. I strongly dislike the writing and the narrative style, and in fact it is difficult for me to even consider this novel a work of literary art.

The story focuses on a Jewish family trying to make a living in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Morris Bober, who has owned of a small grocery store for over 20 years, had come to America from tsarist Russia, having escaped pogroms and conscription into the army. The store is barely surviving: the profit is so low that Morris' daughter Helen has to help financially from her own meager salary just to keep the store afloat. When fancy delicatessen opens nearby Morris' "own poor living [is] cut in impossible half." In addition to the continual economic plight the store is held up: the "holdupniks" take hard-earned $10, and Mr. Bober is injured.

Into this story of struggle for survival of an immigrant family's dreams and human dignity, comes 25-year-old Frank Alpine, who has tried and failed to achieve success in the West and is now looking for a job and a future in Brooklyn. Frank falls in love with Helen and stays to help Mr. Bober with the grocery store. The morality tale of love and redemption is superimposed over the story of economic struggle.

A literary text speaks to me only if it is told in a aesthetically distinguished form. In other words, I do not much care about the story itself; all I care about is the way the story is told. While Mr. Malamud's tale is engrossing and realistic I am unable to perceive any beauty or grace in his prose. When I read novels from roughly the same period by, say, Vladimir Nabokov or Patrick White, I am awed by their magnificent prose and inspired by the sophistication of their literary art and richness of stylistic devices. Here, I feel I might as well be reading a newspaper story.

What's more, I do not want the author to tell me what the characters are thinking. I do not want the author to explain the characters' motives. This is for me, a reader, to figure out. A literary work of art is created as a collaboration between the author and the reader, and it is the reader who makes sense of the story. Not only are pages and pages of detailed explanations of characters' actions unneeded, they trivialize the author's message. The novel has a wonderful two-page fragment about Mr. Bober's conversation with a "macher". Fabulous dialogue! And then, the author spoils everything by explaining what all this was supposed to mean. For Heavens' sake: the readers have brains!

Of course, the above critique is relative to my understanding of the essence of literature. It might be my fault that I had to grind my teeth to finish the book despite its resonant message about human suffering and redemption.

One-and-three-quarter stars.



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