New Bernard Malamud Anthology

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Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.00

This voluminous collection spans the four decades of Malamud’s career, displaying his vast range both in style (the realism of “The Grocery Store,” the absurdism of “The Jewbird”) and in subject matter. The first stories, published in minor magazines in the early 1940s, chronicle life in Brooklyn among Eastern European immigrants; the last fictionalize the lives of famous people. In between are the stories for which Malamud is best known: “The Magic Barrel,” for example, about a rabbinical student who enlists the services of a matchmaker, and “The Silver Crown,” about a teacher seeking help for his dying father.

Perhaps less well-known are the Fidelman-in-Italy stories from the mid-1950s, which serve up a pathetically laughable protagonist: Arthur Fidelman, a would-be scholar and “self-confessed failure as a painter.” In “The Last Mohican,” Fidelman arrives in Rome with a draft of a chapter from his book on the artist Giotto. When an Eastern European refugee who has been following him around disappears—along with the chapter—Fidelman ditches his high-minded labors and spends his stay searching angrily for the beggar.

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