SOURCE: Quart, Barbara Koenig. “Women in Bernard Malamud's Fiction.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 3 (1983): 138-50.

In the following essay, Quart discusses Malamud's technique of keeping his female characters at a distance—both physically and emotionally—from his male characters.

Bernard Malamud's central characters are deeply isolated men. From Morris Bober and Frank Alpine incarcerated in the grocery in Malamud's early and best novel The Assistant, through S. Levin, eastern Jew confronting the West, and Yakov Bok among the gentiles, to the elderly Dubin in the snowy Vermont of Malamud's most recent novel, they suffer intensely and alone. You could say that Malamud's parables of regeneration are about nothing so much as learning a new relation to oneself through relation to others, but equally pervasive in his work is the fear of love and human involvement.

Women are set at a curious distance in Malamud's fiction, despite the intense...