I Never Meta-Fiction I Didn’t Like
Bernard Malamud’s novels The Assistant and The Tenants were published fourteen years apart—in 1957 and 1971, respectively—and while you’ll find thematic and formal similarities, reading the two novels back to back reveals how literary fiction was transformed by the meta-fiction experiments of the1960s.
Similarities
Both novels are set in bleak urban landscapes: The Assistant in a run-down grocery store; The Tenants in an abandoned apartment house.
In both novels, the third-person narrator occasionally assumes the informal tone of the Jewish characters, using a Yiddish-influenced sentence structure: “Tessie lugged out of the room a trunk” (The Assistant, p. 79), “Better he saved himself the long trek” (The Tenants, p. 36). This provides colorful glimpses into the culture of the characters and also lends the novel the old-fashioned quality of oral storytelling.
Both narrators frequently use blunt monikers for the major characters. This seems more than just a way to avoid overusing their names: when Morris Bober is referred to as “the grocer,” or Lesser as “the writer,” these roles seem as freighted with meaning as those of an old-time drama featuring, simply, “the Hero,” “the Girl,” and “the Villain.” Often, these monikers are employed by the characters themselves, as the narrator translates their thoughts for us. Thus, Bober thinks of Frank Alpine as “the Italyener,” and Lesser thinks of Willie Spearmint as “the black.” For these desperate men, both living on the precarious edge of society, everyone can be boiled down to his heritage.
Another similarity between the two novels is the balancing of the inner and outer lives of the characters. In The Assistant, the omniscient narrator spends an extraordinary amount of time within the minds of Bober, Frank, and the grocer’s daughter, Helen. In The Tenant, we are privy to Lesser’s thoughts and feelings. In both novels, the narrator deftly balances these psychologically revealing inner monologues with action and dialogue that propel the stories forward.
Differences
If, as John Gardner and others have noted, the omniscient narrator disappeared when people started to question the existence of God, then the Lord Almighty must have died somewhere between 1957 and 1971. In The Assistant, the God-like narrator dips in and out of different characters’ minds throughout, sometimes within the same paragraph. In The Tenants, the much more limited third-person narrator remains close to one character, Lesser (the writer), through whom we see everything. Any psychological insight into Willie, or Irene, for instance, is Lesser’s insight.
The two novels are also structured differently, with The Tenants made up of short, punchy scenes, while The Assistant, by comparison, rolls out luxuriously. The opening ten pages of the former are comprised of five separate sections, while the first ten pages of the latter are divided into just two. As a result, The Tenants feels more propulsive, in keeping with its more violent, racially charged themes, while The Assistant moves at the pace of one of those slow, unprofitable workdays behind the counter of Morris Bober’s grocery.
But the most startling difference between The Assistant and The Tenants is the author’s embrace, in the later novel, of a much more experimental style. Throughout, Malamud tries changeups in form—mixing first-person and third, past tense and present—that he may have deemed too radical for the earlier novel. And though he was not too timid to include dream sequences in 1957 (e.g., Bober’s dream of his dead son, Ephraim, on page 225 of The Assistant), he did make sure they were clearly introduced as such (“He dreamed of Ephraim…”). In The Tenants, on the other hand, Lesser’s sometimes long, drawn-out dreams are dropped into the narrative unannounced (pp. 19, 70, 131, etc.), where they mix with his real life as if un-separated by sleep.
Other experiments: the dropping of quotation marks on page 43, when Lesser gets high with Willie (on page 46, during their pot-fueled exchange, there’s even a brief section written in play format). Similarly, on page 74, Malamud drops the quotation marks for half the dialogue—Lesser’s half, so that we get the sense he’s paraphrasing more than quoting. In The Tenants, the author repeatedly takes risks with metaphor and poetic language that would be unthinkable in the earlier novel: “Goatskin siren, stop piping to my heart” (p. 13), “The wind like a live ghost, haunting itself” (p. 52), “His breath rang like struck metal” (p. 154). Even a seemingly simple line like “The empty hall was empty,” which is awarded its own paragraph on page 23, is emblematic of Malamud’s new, freer style. In 1957, such a line would have been redundant. In 1971, in a metafictional novel about writing, it somehow makes sense: the hall, always empty, remains empty, despite Lesser hearing noises.
Endings
Throughout The Tenants, Lesser obsesses over how he will end his novel. “Some endings demand you trick the Sphinx,” he says (p. 169). Both this novel and The Assistant, appropriately enough, end on startling notes, but in different ways. Here is the final paragraph of the earlier novel:
One day in April Frank went to the hospital and had himself circumcised. For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew. (p. 246)
Rarely does a novel conclude as surprisingly and yet, in a weird way, as truthfully. Frank Alpine, the Italian-American drifter whom we’ve watched struggle with his inner demons—including a narrow but vivid streak of anti-Semitism—and whom we have rooted for in his quest to win over his boss’s daughter, Helen, finds success in neither business nor love, but only in his spiritual journey of suffering. The “uncircumcised dog,” as Helen calls him on page 168, maims himself for his new religion. But as crazy as this dramatic shift may be, Malamud prepares us for its appropriateness, so that it feels inevitable.
First, there is the thematic motif of suffering. Everyone in the novel is in pain: Morris, the immigrant grocer whose health and business are going down the toilet; his miserable wife, Ida, who resents Morris’s longstanding lack of ambition; their daughter, Helen, whose dream of attending college has gone unrealized; and, of course, Frank, the loner, working for chump change at the grocery, first in order to atone for earlier robbing the place, and then to pursue his doomed love for Helen. For Frank, who equates suffering with being Jewish (a belief reinforced by Morris’s own view of “Jewishness”), it only makes sense that he would convert.
On a craft level, Malamud lays the groundwork for his ending by boring so deeply, and so relentlessly often, into the psyche of Frank Alpine. When Frank peeps at Helen in the bathroom (p. 75), the narrator describes his actions—the squeezing into the air shaft, the climbing of the dumbwaiter rope—but at the heart of this episode is Frank’s interior thought process. “If you do it,” he tells himself, “you will suffer.” Yet he can’t resist, and when he sees her, “he felt a throb of pain at her nakedness, an overwhelming desire to love her, at the same time an awareness of loss, of never having had what he had wanted most, and other such memories he didn’t care to recall.”
What does this have to do with Frank’s conversion at the end? The reason that sudden turn feels so organic is that Malamud has allowed us into Frank’s tortured head. Imagine a less psychologically penetrating author—someone like Cormac McCarthy, who does not allow his narrator this kind of intimacy—throwing such a curveball. It would not ring true. But because we know Frank so thoroughly—because with every action we’ve been privy to his re-action—his extreme final act makes emotional sense.
The ending of The Tenants is no less extreme, with Lesser, enraged at Willie for destroying his manuscript, taking an ax to Willie’s typewriter. This leaves Lesser, after ten years of labor on his third novel, “nauseated by not writing…nauseated…by the words, by the thought of them” (p. 210). The novel then ends on a surreal note as the two men stalk each other in the halls, hurling vicious racial slurs, and finally killing each other: “Lesser felt his jagged ax sink into bone and brain as the groaning black’s razor-sharp saber, in a single boiling stabbing slash, cut the white’s balls from the rest of him” (p. 211). In a heartbreaking coda, the comically pathetic landlord Levenspiel, who has been begging Lesser to vacate the premises for years, pleads for mercy in both English and Yiddish: “Mercy, the both of you, for Christ’s sake, Levenspiel cries. Hab rachmones, I beg you.” He goes on to repeat the word “mercy” ninety-eight times.
Remembering that this novel was written during a time of violent racial strife, one can’t help but hear the author pleading with whites and blacks to put aside their differences. On a purely craft level, he is breaking with tradition—and with the kind of rigorous literary “form” that the old-fashioned Lesser preaches to Willie about—and striking out into more experimental directions, including the sort of confrontational style that Willie embraces in his writing. As with the powerful ending of The Assistant, Malamud has prepared us, in this case by previously establishing a surreal sensibility (with the dreams and unconventional punctuation), so that the climax, while bizarre and more symbolic than “real,” makes both thematic and formal sense.
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