SOURCE: Alter, Iska. “The Fixer, The Tenants, and the Historical Perspective.” In The Good Man Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud, pp. 154-73. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1981.

In the following essay, Alter explores differences in Malamud's interpretation of historical significance in The Fixer, which Alter categorizes as a novel of “Jewish historicism,” and The Tenants, which he calls a “work of a disillusioned American idealist.”

From the mythic transliteration of baseball history in The Natural to the adaptation of the Beiliss case that forms the basis of The Fixer to the angry eschatology of The Tenants, Bernard Malamud has been concerned, either obliquely or overtly, with the ways in which history shapes the individual, defining the nature of inward perception and controlling the relationships with the institutions and personnel of the external environment. Indeed, the ambivalence and growing pessimism of the later fiction might...