Monday's Reviews Today: Malamud on Malamud and a Folk Legend in Fiction

by Staff, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 1/20/2006

Sneak peeks of next week's reviews: Offering up the first significant biography of Bernard Malamud since his death in 1986, Janna Malamud Smith delivers a touching and uncompromising look at her dad in My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Telling a very different tale of childhood anguish, author Keith Donohue explores the psychic effects of an unusual kidnapping in his understated debut, The Stolen Child.

My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
Janna Malamud Smith. Houghton Mifflin, $24 (304p) ISBN 0-618-69166-9

No biography of Malamud, one of the great Jewish-American writers, has appeared since his death in 1986, at age 72, so his daughter’s beautiful memoir offers the first intimate look at his life. And it is intimate, drawing on correspondence and early journals that describe Malamud’s struggle to define himself as a writer and express the anguish that afflicted him all his life: insecurity about his talent, sadness and shame over his childhood as the son of an unsuccessful and unimaginative immigrant grocer and a mother who went mad. Smith (Private Matters) is herself an accomplished writer, bringing a keen and nuanced intelligence to explain her father’s efforts to transcend these feelings and transmute them into fiction; she offers a fascinating look, for example, at how Malamud’s discovery of Freud helped him grasp that "grand moral struggles belong to the common man as much as to the hero." Refreshingly, Smith is more interested in understanding than judging her father, even when relating his affair, in the early ’60s, with one of his Bennington College students; she reserves her rage for the "louche" environment—ruled by "patriarchal harem entitlement"—in which such affairs were a matter of course. Smith offers a profound portrait of a loving father, a writer whose struggles with his own frailties fueled enduring works of literature. (Mar. 15)

The Stolen Child
Keith Donohue. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, $23.95 (272p) ISBN 0-385-51616-9

Folk legends of the changeling serve as a touchstone for Donohue’s haunting debut, set vaguely in the American northeast, about the maturation of a young man troubled by questions of identity. At age seven, Henry Day is kidnapped by hobgoblins and replaced by a look-alike impostor. In alternating chapters, each Henry relates the tale of how he adjusts to his new situation. Human Henry learns to run with his hobgoblin pack, who never age but rarely seem more fey than a gang of runaway teens. Hobgoblin Henry develops his uncanny talent for mimicry into a music career and settles into an otherwise unremarkable human life. Neither Henry feels entirely comfortable with his existence, and the pathos of their losses influences all of their relationships and experiences. Inevitably, their struggles to retrieve their increasingly forgotten pasts put them on paths that intersect decades later. Donohue keeps the fantasy as understated as the emotions of his characters, while they work through their respective growing pains. The result is an impressive novel of outsiders whose feelings of alienation are more natural than supernatural. (May)