A Few Thoughts on Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives.

 

In Zuckerman Bound, Roth contrasts the way his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman and his brother work:

Nathan kept count as Henry slipped each page beneath the last. Seventeen—some five thousand words. It would have taken him a week to write five thousand words, but Henry had done it overnight, and in a hotel suite with three young children and a wife. Zuckerman couldn’t write if there was a cat in the room. That was one of the differences between them.

If you have some sympathy for Nathan’s need for quiet while writing, then you might appreciate Bernard Malamud’s novel Dubin’s Lives. In contrast to the media obsessed world I seem to live in, William Dubin hardly even mentions the radio, never mentions the television, and goes to one or two movies. Somewhere near the start of the book, Dubin mentions Nixon and Watergate. A hundred or so pages later, Dubin mentions president Ford. This absence of concern for politics, even in the middle of a president resigning, marks a huge contrast to the world I live in where it seems that there is nearly nothing about Trump or Biden that someone is not talking about.

Enough about politics. Here are a few lines from the book that I enjoyed.

Malamud begins the book with this line:

They sometimes met on country roads when there were flowers or snow.

He felt for words in a fog, so busy trying to remember that he failed to think. He read the dictionary, then shoved it aside. Language is not life. I’ve given up life to write lives. P 316

In a conversation with his wife, Kitty.

 

“To be honest,” he confessed, sitting up with the force of his insight, “William Dubin, the biographer, is grateful to you for having through the years described to him what his lacking love, lacking nature, come to — for having kept him up with himself so that he could be a truthful measure, as well as recorder, of the lives of those he writes about, and therefore a better biographer.” P 337.