Lee Siegel writes in the New York Times:
Malamud didn’t need to copulate his way to freedom from Mommy. As a little boy, he had saved his own mother from a suicide attempt; she spent the next two years in an insane asylum, where she died in 1929. Later he watched his schizophrenic brother drift from one mental institution to another. Malamud’s fatal impulse, as Davis poignantly shows, was to try to recover his mother — and perhaps his brother too — through the love of women. According to this sympathetic biographer, Malamud’s Christian wife painfully tolerated his unfaithfulness, though she was not above responding with an occasional despairing infidelity of her own.
…Like an embarrasing old uncle, Malamud is barely referred to these days. On those few occasions when he is publicly admired, tribute usually comes in the form of sentimental commentary from younger, self-consciously Jewish writers, whose parochial picture of Malamud ironically confirms the denigrating comments Roth made a generation ago. Far more frequently, however, you find critics celebrating Bellow and Roth, above all, for their intelligence, and never mentioning Malamud. And indeed, instinct, not intelligence, is what is most salient in Malamud’s work. His writing struggles with the permanence of irrational forces and the necessity of arriving at some kind of reckoning with them. For Malamud, the obligation to be moral isn’t rational. It occurs all of a sudden, sprung from within. For Malamud, the rational justification of morality is, on the contrary, often the stuff of moral vanity and outrageous hypocrisy. From feeling, a Malamud character might say, you don’t escape.
