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.