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. 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. Malamud's allusions to Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville establish Seymore Levin's basic transcendental ideal and its qualifications and revisions. 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. But these analogies also point the way to Levin's liberation through action as he learns to control his own fate throughout the novel's two major movements, the purification of impure academics and the legitimacy of illegitimate love. (p. 115)

When Levin first arrives at Cascadia College in Easchester as a new instructor in...