Reason Read: TIOLI, ROOT

I received only the short story The Magic Barrel and that is what I am reviewing. The story is of a young man who has been busy in college and has no social life. He contacts a marriage broker, Salzman to remedy this problem. Salzman offers a young window (rejected), an older lady, school teacher, and a young girl with a lame foot. Finkler rejects all of these. He eventually agrees to meet the school teacher and comes to the realization that he has never loved any one even God. Later he finds a small picture of a young girl that he falls in love with and insists that she is the one. Salzman tells him that she is not the one. Later he agrees to let them meet (he is her father) and the girl is dressed in a red dress and white shoes. Her father is behind the wall saying the prayer of the dead. The ending is ambiguous. Is this girl trouble, is this the new generation of Americans, or was it a trick of the father to marry off his daughter. ( )

This is a set of short stories by one of America's most gifted authors. Most of the stories are allegorical, but reference everyday situations from Malamud's childhood in New York. The characters are dynamic and humorous and each story is rich enough to stand on its own. ( )

Stories told in such a clear, masterful style that it almost hurts about people whose self-image is disturbed and expectations deceived by an intervention of a sometimes mystical factor, a spiritual contingency, as it were, following a long ruinous chain of mundane contingencies that brought them to where they stand in the beginning of their story.
Mostly set a decade or so after the war among Jewish immigrants in the US, with several forays into Italy and sometimes involving other ethnic communities, the stories draw you into the squalor and misery with a very sure guiding hand; one might suspect some moralising, but it is never actually there, only questions raised; the story is not about you, anyway.
The voices and the scenes are often rather funny, but I never really laughed. This is a balance that I am trying to appreciate. ( )

What I liked best was the sense of living 60 years ago or so, that the references and common practices in the world were a bit different than today. Still with these folks living in the past, they are universally just like we are, their worries are so specific and exactly like ours. I am not explaining this well, but imagine that I was able to think just like the tailor Manischevitz, and wonder if the earth was giving me a test. Fantastic stuff. ( )

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2013/07/review-magic-barrel-by-bernard-malamu...

Bernard Malamud's first short story collection, The Magic Barrel, won the 1959 National Book Award. Does that make it a great book?

I am drawn to 20th and 21st century male writers, especially to Americans. In part, this must reflect the sexism of the publishing industry, especially early in the century. Partly, it must reflect a prejudice that I have (that most boys must have, or else why would the psuedonyms JK Rowling and SE Hinton and Franklin W. Dixon exist?).

In half-jest, when I last re-organized and pruned my books, I filled an entire bookcase with books about lonely men. Roth and Hemingway and Miller and Coetzee and Faulkner.

But I was disappointed by the lonely men populating Malamud's thirteen stories. Even those who have women in their lives don't know how to allow themselves to be helped. The women are either at home with the children ("Behold the Key"), harping about money ("The Bill"), laying in bed dying ("Angel Levine"), or prizes to be idealize, won or discarded ("The Magic Barrel," "The Lady of the Lake," and "The Girl of My Dreams," respectively).

For fun, let's apply the Bechdel Test to The Magic Barrel.
1) Are there two or more women in it that have names? Yes.
2) Do they talk to each other? No.
3) Do they talk about something other than a man? No.

I think the Bechdel test has plenty of flaws. Primarily, that the development or failure of a relationship between two people is the most ripe topic for art in human history, and for most of human history, characters in stories were limited to one of two genders. Relatedly, given the constrictions of focused story-telling (unless you're going the Ulysses route and throwing in everything), once we establish the development of a relationship as a theme, the audience expects nearly all scenes and conversations to revolve around that theme). So yes, we should expect nearly every love story to fail the test (and, in their fashion, each of Malamud's short stories is a love story).

But all the same, I was surprised by the uniformity of the characters in The Magic Barrel. Too many lonely men, going about their same old lives the same old way. ( )