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Classic Malamud, Charming Connor

© Robert Powers

American literature in the 20th century boasts a comparatively short list of great fiction writers. Those who assess the worth of those authors born since 1900 would assign the appellation of greatness to perhaps only a couple of dozen practitioners of the novel and the short story.

On most lists would be the name of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), by consensus among the top dozen authors of the century. Proof, if anyone questions that title, comes in The Complete Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35). There can be few devoted readers of short fiction who would argue with the contention that Malamud was one of the great storytellers, deservedly ranked along side such icons as Chekhov, Babel and Flannery O'Connor.

Usually writing about what he knew, he objected to being labeled a Jewish-American writer. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His mother died when Malamud was 14. He and his younger brother were raised by their father, who operated a small grocery. Many of Malamud's early stories reflect that background.

Malamud wrote that his parents' world taught him their values: "The welfare of human beings, what makes a man function as a man. Theirs was a person-centered world, one that regarded the qualities of people." Much of Malamud's writing contains a clear sense of humanism, focusing his concerns not on worldly success, but rather on such abstract human values as love.

In denying the label of Jewish-American writer, Malamud protested that he wrote "for those who read." And he observed correctly that both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have objected to being called Jewish-American writers.

The 54 stories collected in this new book show his versatility, while he devotes much effort in his early work to a background of a small grocery in a large city. In Edward A. Abramson's book, Bernard Malamud Revisited (Twayne, 1993), the critic notes that in early Malamud stories, there's a lack of complexity, "but it is their very carefully crafted simplicity that heightens the effectiveness of the epiphany that so frequently occurs in Malamud's tales."

Malamud reached greatness when he began to explore the effect of fantasy. In such tales as The Magic Barrel and Angel Levine, he mixes the unreal with a stark realism that makes the stories unique and completely satisfying.

Abramson places Malamud in the literary tradition that includes Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, Faulkner and Hemingway. You can't get better company than those gentlemen.