Levin’s own allusions in most cases, for Levin abuses literary contexts and adopts literary roles to rationalize his failures, allowing himself to be trapped in his own comfortable analogies. Malamud’s allusions to Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville establish Seymore Levin’s basic transcendental ideal and its qualifications and revisions. Malamud’s central archetype here is not, as some critics have insisted, the imported Fisher King of wasteland literature, but that native hybrid, the American Adam. So goes most of the criticism of this strange book if it is good, it is because Malamud wrote it, and in spite of its many flaws.1 But A New Life deserves to survive on its own terms, its climate of nineteenth-century American myth and its rambling but thematically integrated nineteenth-century structure. Even an anti-hero who is not an anti-hero. A leisurely, undulating story with loose ends trailing from richly woven motifs and allusions. A col lege novel that seems more concerned with sexual freedom than with academic freedom. P A U L W I T H E R I N G T O N South Dakota State University Malamud’s Allusive Design in A New Life What in the world of fiction is Malamud doing in A New Life? A Western novel on vacation from the New York Jewish climate. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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