BOOKS Sense and Sensuality

Dubin’s Lives by Bernard Malamud (Farrar Straus Giroux, $10) requires no fanfare, only a few cautionary notes, because it’s going to be a bestseller. Malamud is one of the finest and most popular of living novelists; he’s won two National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. He’ll do all right without any help from you or me. At the beginning, this promises to be one of his best works of fiction, a story which moves on several levels at once without spoiling anybody’s fun. The narrative is full of ideas and allusions, even outright philosophical discourse, but none of this business impedes the rapid march of events or threatens the humanity of the characters, who are very real and very finely delineated.

The hero of the novel, William Dubin, is something of an intellectual, a writer of biographies who’s just begun work on a life of D. H. Lawrence. You’d expect him to think of the Larger Issues every so often. At the outset, he reminds you a little of Saul Bellow’s hero Herzog, though after a while you’re relieved to find that he’s less pretentious and long-winded, and much lustier.

The story turns on the aging Dubin’s internal struggle to come to terms with his sudden, overpowering desire for a young girl, and his literary struggle with the complexities of D. H. Lawrence – two concerns that are interwoven in his mind and cause him considerable anguish. His relationship with Fanny, a beautiful and promiscuous drifter, is at first bewildering to him, later frustrating, still later ecstatic, and finally all of the above.

The other relationships in the novel – with his wife, his daughter, his friends – are mirrors that reflect to Dubin some facet of his own soul, his sad and laughable ordeal as he struggles to recapture youth and joy and still retain the dignity of an aging man. For instance, while he broods over his infatuation with Fanny, hiding his guilty secret from his wife, she’s also on edge, believing he’s guessed at her relationship with a younger man. And as he and Fanny arrive in Rome for an illicit holiday, he spots his daughter, who is having a fling of her own with a 60-year-old black man. Dubin alternately hides from her and searches for her, the adulterer turned outraged father.

To place this private odyssey in proper perspective, Malamud interweaves a number of contemporary images that make concrete the world surrounding Dubin and his adventures. His stepson lives in Sweden, a deserter from the war in Viet Nam. Dubin has been a guest at the White House and turned down an offer to be LBJ’s official biographer. While he’s preoccupied with Fanny, the Watergate hearings are coming to a climax. These events don’t touch Dubin deeply, but they do serve to define his strengths and weaknesses in a time of moral confusion, when, for many, sexual involvement seemed like one good way to forget an indecent world.

For the first 200 pages or so, Dubin is a middle-aged man who is surprised by a reprise of his youth, only to discover that everything is much too complicated after you’ve been married for over 20 years and fallen into a life of routine. When Dubin fails in his attempt to be a lover, he’s both amusing and pathetic, a desperate clown sinking into senility with a rat-cap on his head. But when he begins to succeed with Fanny (p. 208), he becomes simpler and ultimately duller, probably because at this stage his conscience no longer haunts him, reminding him that he has a wife who is neither frigid nor unattractive and who treats him with intelligent sympathy while he’s mooning over Fanny. After he’s become the sexually liberated Don Juan, he’s more concerned with himself than with others, like an adolescent – that most tiresome of all human beings.

Yet I have a strong suspicion that Malamud is utterly absorbed with the bedroom antics of the later Dubin, that the author enjoys giving the girl to his hero, taking her back, giving her again, taking her back – the way you might enjoy teasing a cat with a rubber mouse. I have a distinct feeling that Malamud develops a genuine liking for Dubin the lover, thinks he’s a better man for having had his romp despite the injuries to all concerned. Toward the end of the narrative, there’s a little swagger to Malamud ’s prose that matches the swagger in Dubin’s gait as he congratulates himself on his performance with this surprisingly gratified young woman.

Dubin is not morally repulsive, merely oversimplified, less fully human when his story has ended than when it was only half-finished. 1 expected more from Malamud, an old master of complexity; he is, after all, the author of The Magic Barrel, the finest treatment of the Jewish experience in all of American literature. Though it’s probably unfair to say it, I had hoped this new novel would continue to expand our understanding of the Jewish contribution to our heritage. But in his late middle age, Malamud has become infatuated with sexuality – just like his hero.

But perhaps this book does tell us something more about the Jewish experience. According to legend (or so I’m told), in an older time when rabbis had finished a lifetime of learning and of teaching about the meaning of life, they retired and took a place of honor at the gates of the city. There they were supposed to spend their old age gazing into the distance, watching for the Messiah. If Malamud is telling us the truth, we have to accept the fact that in our own time their eyes have begun to turn elsewhere.



If after Dubin’s Lives you’re still determined to read books about adultery – and this subject has dominated Western literature since the 13th century – then you should take up Austin Wright’s new novel, The Morley Mythology (Harper & Row, $10.95). Again the hero is a middle-aged semi-intellectual who ends up in the arms of a young girl. William Morley is a college professor who’s been married a long time and is in the habit of behaving himself, though, like Dubin’s, his earlier years haven’t been completely free of infidelity. He’s a thoroughly confused man. He maintains a coherent view of life only in the classroom, 50 minutes at a stretch. Outside, like most of his colleagues, he’s less morally certain of himself, given to private agonies and philosophical nonsense. Thus, in place of a more conventional religious or ethical system, he’s substituted a “mythology,” a catalogue of heroes that has grown up out of his childhood fantasies and become a subliminal part of his mature personality. In this list of idols are baseball players, opera singers, fictional characters, even animals and inanimate objects. Each of these is enshrined in his self-centered heart as a minor deity, something he can worship in secret because he can’t believe in any more universally acknowledged truth.

Such a view of life may seem no more than amusing and eccentric; but, as Wright shows us, it can also leave one vulnerable in a world of unscrupulous people. Sitting at home one night, Morley is surprised by an anonymous telephone caller who seems to know all about his mythology. As much out of fear as curiosity he agrees to meet with the invader, a sleazy con man named McCurdy who seems intent on blackmail.

But if such is his aim, he proceeds in a curious way, suggesting that Morley dictate an account of his “mythology” which McCurdy will transcribe and edit for publication: The Morley Mythology: A book of fact and picture. Landscape studies and tours of the Morley mind with emphasis on its origins. Only a jackass or an egomaniac would take such a project seriously. Yet Morley is intrigued with the idea that his innermost thoughts are worth sharing with the rest of the world.

In fact, so self-centered is he that he allows himself to be drawn by McCurdy into a snarl of sordid relationships that end in adultery, a showdown with his wife, and a shocking resolution to the blackmail scheme. The story is by turns hilarious, gripping, and unbearably painful, since it touches on the weakness of most 20th-century Americans, who no longer know where to look for a guide to conduct. A man of 50, Morley can recall in detail the careers of mediocre baseball pitchers and second sopranos, but when his brother’s wife and a young girl set out to seduce him, he can’t turn to any of his heroes for moral instruction. Later, when he tells his wife about his misadventures, he can’t explain his actions, can’t even understand why he did what he did. After all, where is his ethical standard now that his gods have retired from the Yankees and the Metropolitan Opera?

These are serious questions posed in a narrative that happens to be both funny and filled with legitimate surprises, in character development as well as plot. If Morley is not a reformed man at the end, he is at least a wiser one, and Wright’s wry lament for him is a lament for the modern world in general, though by no means a grim or petulant one.



By contrast Madison Jones’ new novel, Passage through Gehenna (L.S.U. Press, $8.95), is as grim in tone as you’d want to find, a horror story of extraordinary power. This is Jones’ sixth novel, and if you’ve missed his name on the best-seller list, it’s because in his work he’s avoided the easy road to popular success – detailed romanticizing of sex, glib oversimplification of social issues, easy resolution of the conflict between good and evil. In fact, he has dealt so circumspectly with religious and political questions that readers have come away from his works with the feeling that his world is just as complicated as the real one – but by no means hopeless.

And yet his novels have always contained the elements of a good story. In this one we find sex, murder, drugs, and even the hint of supernatural evil. But these matters are not introduced as ends in themselves; they function to define a fairly complicated pattern of human behavior, one that has theological as well as psychological implications.

At the beginning of the narrative, Jones’ hero, Judd Rivers, is a young mountain boy whose religious zeal is so pure it almost cries out for violation. When he comes to town to seek an education he meets two women who teach him everything he’ll ever have to know in this world about good and evil. One, Lily Nunn, tries to corrupt him, not only because she despises his innocence, but also in order to strike out against the community at large, from which she’s isolated herself. The other, Hannah Rice, tries to save him from Lily’s influence, not to possess him herself but to free his soul from evil.

It’s like a medieval morality play, but Jones’ version is much more complicated and considerably more realistic. The Bad Angel, while exuding an aura of sexuality, is somehow as prim as her name suggests, though not genuinely chaste, for she uses desire as a weapon. Lily’s is a cold continence, cunningly and maliciously maintained. Hannah, the Good Angel, a preacher’s daughter with old-fashioned moral compunctions, yields to Judd because she believes it’s the only way to save him from Lily and, more importantly, because she loves him.

Jones’ greatest achievement in telling this story is the sense of evil that he creates in defining the character of Lily Nunn. She’s a credible human being – we’ve all known her – yet there’s something unearthly about her. She’s a witch, a vampire, one of those people who prey on other human beings and seem to derive their power from a source beyond themselves. To call such people “paranoid” or “schizophrenic” is to do no more than pin a name on them, the modern equivalent of “witch” or “vampire.”

Before she’s finished, Lily destroys Judd and Hannah and disrupts the entire community, which never fully understands the nature of the dark shadow that’s fallen over the lives of its citizens. Yet the forces of good have something to say in this novel, however ambiguous and unsatisfactory they may sound to readers who are used to platitudes. The cross is held up before Lily’s eyes, if only figuratively, and Jones ends up by giving us a parable that’s both old and new, a narrative whose meaning is so orthodox it will come as a great surprise to contemporary readers.

In fact, all three of these writers -Jones, Wright, Malamud – are doing familiar things and doing them with imagination and originality. In what is supposedto be a dry season for fiction, they aresurprisingly vital, masters in an age ill-equipped to appreciate them. These threedeserve to be read, and of course they willbe – if not now, perhaps later.