The Assistant

Unassuming and tacked down to a hard and unromantic urban setting, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is surprising for the force and power of its lyricism. Perhaps, accustomed as we are to an either/or that so typically presents the hyper-examined lives of the well-taught and well-to-do or the naturalistic squalor of the deprived, we don't expect such yearning, such depth of feeling, in characters so restrained by poverty, by disadvantage, by a want of education that is so consciously felt by the primary characters themselves: when you are grappling with how to pay the bills, who has the clarity of mind to think and feel with any depth? (Viz. Raskolnikov here--an extreme version of this syndrome: a man of great sensitivity whose judgment is so clouded by his poverty that he commits murder.) Malamud never grants a single sentimnetal word in his descriptions of his characters, but throughout the novel, with Dostoyevsky-like precision, he pries into their minds, setting out in plain terms every least doubt and each glimmering of hope. The result is that these people are real as daylight, sympathetic despite their sometimes coldness, and eminently there, on the page and in the reader's mind.

The Assistant begins with Morris Bober, a down-on-his-luck emigrant Jewish grocer who has set up shop in a hapless Brooklyn neighborhood with a primarily gentile population. We soon meet his wife, Ida, whose nagging and browbeating don't seem like stereotype until you back away from the novel to put things in perspective; in the novel, she comes across as a realized character, and the constant verbal put-downs she directs at her sad-sack husband seem like a logical response to the meanness of their livelihood and the decades of barely scraping by they have faced. Morris and Ida have a daughter, Helen, who is bookish and aspiring and whose beauty and quiet melancholy suffuse the book with an elegiac quality; Helen is only in her early twenties, but her life already seems like a look back on opportunity that never quite developed. Lurking somewhere in the background is a dead son, Ephraim, who passed long ago and is by this point little more than an occasional memory, another reminder of a past that, rather than providing a romanticized counterpoint to the present, only makes the present seem part of the same hollowness. To this family dynamic enters Frank Alpino, a drifter who wants to make something of himself and, through a chain of unlikely events that Malamud somehow makes seem realistic, becomes Morris' assistant at the grocery. Frank, orphaned at age five, might be there to serve as Morris' surrogate son, but if he somehow fulfills this embedded psychic need, Morris himself, numbed as he is to the world around him, seems not to be consciously aware of it.

Though dirty and unshaven at first, Frank is not without a certain charisma, and much of the appeal of his character (to Morris and to the reader--and eventually to Helen) is his earnest desire for self-improvement, which he is more than ready to put into action as opportunity arises. Frank's admiration for St. Francis of Assissi (presumably his namesake) establishes a blatant but still effective symbolic nod to the life of the saint, who represents a kind of discipline and asceticism that Frank wishes to achieve himself. This kind of discipline is something Frank needs, because just about every move he makes is a misstep; every time he tries to do right, it seems, he ends up doing wrong, and the result is that the more bad he does, paradoxically, the more the reader sympathizes with him. Frank is a liar despite his forthrightness. He is a thief and a peeping-tom, and eventually he does worse, but what defines him as a character is his constant wish to do good. We never doubt that he wants to do right.

Frank pursues Helen, furtively at first, and eventually, through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, establishes something of a relationship with her--initially one-sided, but more and more mutual as she opens up to the notion of his potential. Helen then takes it upon herself to educate Frank on some of the finer works of the Western literary canon. Among these works are Anna Karenina, whose title character provides something of a model for Helen's character, and Crime and Punishment. Malamud's novel benefits nicely from the name dropping, especially regarding Crime and Punishment: both novels are about poverty and suffering, and both take on as their protagonist a criminal who at times challenges our sympathies but never strays far from them. Both novels also resonate with religious meaning, though for Malamud this means not a discovery of Christian themes (St. Francis notwithstanding) but rather an exploration of the cultural and spiritual significance of Judaism, which in The Assistant signifies a way to live despite suffering, a way to endure. Both novels also struggle with Big Ideas of universal import, though Malamud's novel does so in a notably less self-conscious manner than does Dostoyevsky's. In the grand American tradition, Malamud chooses to ground all of his ideas in the hard-scrabble everyday.

In contrast to this groundedness, the lyricism of this novel has much to do with birds. There is only a handful of real birds in the book: notably, when Frank is in the park feeding pigeons and they flock to him, just as they did in the story about St. Francis preaching to the birds, only Frank has bread for them, not spritual convictions. Representations of the avian factor in elsewhere. When Frank crawls up an air shaft to peak through a bathroom window to spy on Helen as she undresses to take a shower, her breasts appear to him "like small birds in flight." Later, dejected and at odds not only with Helen but with himself, in the midst of a confused and confusing love, Frank on a whim carves out of an old pine plank the form of a bird. The symbolism is clear: no one takes flight in the novel, but everyone wants to. Snow and moonlight and flowers also present symbols of nature, and it's not hard to see what these elements mean in a setting that is unlovely and unkind. Ironically, perhaps, it is the nearby park that provides the scene of the novel's most violent and depraved event, reminding us how our attempts to restore a semblance of the natural in the midst of human contrivance often take on a sinister tone.

The Assistant is not an absolutely perfect novel, but it's about as close to one as we could ever hope for. At times, it seems as though the prose dashes along a little haphazardly and the sentences serve just to shove us forward to the next event, but if so perhaps it is only because Malamud and the reader both are anxious to move toward the next phase of the narrative. The conclusion of the novel is a little suspect also; I found myself not entirely believing it, but I appreciated it nonetheless for what it said about the characters, about where they were going, about the continuous potential, never quite realized on the page, of their asserting the meaning of their own lives.

From the window of the delivery room, I could see a construction crew at work on the roof over the entryway to emergency, two floors below. The roof was a curving metal wave, very modern, and it was, in a way, before the contractions got to be too big, kind of comforting to think of the world operating in its usual fashion outside of our little room. Amy was being induced, which is part of the story, as we'll see, and early on things were easy. She was holding my hand and listening to The Flaming Lips on the iPod, rocking out just like it was 1993, before we'd met and before anything like the birth of a child had occurred as any kind of definable reality for either one of us. It seemed easy so far, but this being our second child, we knew better. We knew that this was a peaceful little interlude before things got really heavy.

My wife was being induced because Dr. Awesome--so called by Amy because of her relentlessly sunny disposition--said the sooner, the better. All around, at the Ob-Gyn--the Baby Factory, as we call it, in and out like clockwork--we've gotten better than usual service. Amy's dad is a doctor at the nearby hospital, and there was a precise advantage here to her keeping her maiden name. More than that, though, she has a blood clotting disorder of the kind that will probably never cause her any trouble in her life but which, if care is not taken to avoid conditions favorable to clotting, could result in a serious lawsuit. Nobody wants that. Care was indeed being taken from every angle.

And that was part of the reason for the early induction, a week and a half before the due date. No one wanted to take any risks. Also, the Little Brother, as we'd taken to calling him, was not gaining weight at the rate predicted, which could be a sign of clotting in the placenta. Better safe than sorry.

When the contractions got to be too much, Amy got up and walked around the room--staggered is more like it, tethered by all sorts of cables to a monitor and IV stand that I had to push along behind her--and sat in a chair for a while. When she got back in the bed, the nurses had trouble with the monitoring equipment. The contractions were getting too strong too quickly. Amy was shaky, quivering. The nurses gave her oxygen. The baby's heartbeat had dropped from the 130s to the 80s. For a while, it disappeared altogether. More nurses came in--four, then five, then six--followed finally by Dr. Awesome, who said something about "another option." One of the nurses handed Amy a form on a clipboard signifying consent to undertake a c-section, and she scribbled something on it that bore a vague resemblance to her signature. Before I knew it, the whole crew was headed down the hall to the operating room. One nurse stayed behind as I started putting on the scrubs she handed me. I ripped the pants while pulling them on.

To get to the operating room, we had to go through construction. The air was clogged with dust from sanded drywall compound, and a big plastic tarp was blue-taped to the end of the corridor. The others had already gone through, and one of the workers was already taping the plastic sheet back to the wall. He took it down again, and I went in following the nurse. I had to wait out in the hall for a few minutes, between the construction area and the operating room. I wasn't sure why I had to wait. I sat down in a plastic chair. A worker came up to re-tape the tarp hanging over the doorway. He saw me sitting there, and he asked me how it was going. He might have thought I was a doctor, or maybe he didn't. I don't know what kind of look I might have had on my face. I don't remember what I said back to him.

In a few minutes, one of the nurses came out and called me into the operating room. There was more talk of another option. I heard pieces of conversation, but I didn't understand most of it. I remember hearing a fragment of a sentence from a nurse I didn't recognize: "All the stuff they've put in her," a fragment that had, in context, the weight of a declaration. I assumed she was referring to Pitocin, the agent that induces contractions. She wasn't referring to any kind of pain medication because Amy hadn't had any. I stood next to the bed holding Amy's hand while Dr. Awesome reached in and manually effaced her cervix the final two centimeters.

"We've got baby's heartbeat again and he's looking just fine, but just in case we're going to stay right here. The anesthesiologist is standing by in case we need to go for another option."

The anesthesiologist came into the room, all matter of fact, but perturbed about something. He spoke to Dr. Awesome for a moment, then came over to Amy, whose contractions were getting stronger. He hovered over her, waiting, while Dr. Awesome waited at the other end of the table. She told Amy to put her right foot up on her shoulder, and I helped hold up the leg and put it into position. Nurses held up the other leg.

The anesthesiologist started asking questions, matter of fact, his tone no different than if he were sitting down in the office and running over a few of the routine preliminaries. He said he knew that she was not in the best frame of mind to be answering questions, but that admissions had failed to go through the required paperwork on the matter (a hint of annoyance there interrupting the facade). He was interrupted by Dr. Awesome before his interrogation had really begun:

"OK, Amy, on your next contraction I need you to bear down."

Instructions were given for breathing and counting. I was to do the counting. The contraction came. The doctor said that Amy was doing a great job: awesome. The nurses gave their praise. The anesthesiologist went back to his questions. Had she ever been given anesthetic before? Amy said that she had, when she'd had her wisdom teeth out. Any problems? Everything was fine. He asked her about allergies, history of illnesses. Bronchitis last fall. OK. Another contraction. The breathing, counting, pushing. The anesthesiologist backed off.

Two more rounds of contractions and the boy was out. He was fine. He sucked in the air and whimpered like a cat. He turned from purple to pink just like that, just like he was supposed to.