Posted on June 17, 2008 by Steve Pollak
The Guardian published an interesting piece this weekend about what to read while "going on holiday this summer." The article was a survey of opinions from prominent writers about what books they recommend as "perfect literary travelling companions."
I was not all that surprised when Dave Eggers recommended Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March," for anyone heading to Chicago. He said it was "probably the ultimate Chicago book." Here's more:
It incorporates just about everything you could imagine - the American dream, distinctions of class and race, the chaos of immigration, ideas of Utopia, the "special destiny" Augie assumes awaits him . . . It's big, crazy, relentless, very funny and holds up as if it were written yesterday. Bellow is one of two Chicagoans, the other being Hemingway, who won the Nobel prize.
I continued reading the piece and came across a tidbit that did surprise me: Bernard Malamud as the best writer to take along with you to ... the Pacific Northwest? British travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban explains why:
My first introduction to the Pacific Northwest was in 1964, long before I visited the United States. It was at a motorway service area on the newly built M1, where, looking for something to read over my coffee and ham sandwich, I found Bernard Malamud's A New Life (Penguin) on a carousel of mass-market paperbacks. I knew Malamud from his exquisitely turned short stories of poor New York Jews in The Magic Barrel (Vintage Classics). This was clearly something different: A New Life had a lurid jacket and bore the legend, "He found strange refuge - love with another man's wife." I spent a long time over that miserable sandwich. Malamud's story, or fable, of Seymour Levin, an indigent English instructor from New York, "formerly a drunkard", who finds himself in exile at a "cow college" in Oregon, teaching freshmen composition, kept me spellbound. Written when Malamud himself was in exile, in the English department of Oregon State University at Corvallis (then known as Oregon State Agricultural College), it brilliantly captures the shock of the far, mountainous Northwest as seen by a bewildered newcomer from the urban East Coast. The wild grandeur of the landscape is set against the narrow social and political conformity of its inhabitants, at a time when America was in the throes of McCarthyism. Levin is last seen in his rattletrap car, heading back East, too "unAmerican" in every way for straight-laced Oregon in the 1950s.
Malamud's star has dimmed since his death in 1986, and many readers know him best as the model for the great Jewish-American writer EI Lonoff in Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. A New Life appears to be out of print, though it is easily available over the internet, with prices starting at 1p. For a beautifully written, acid comedy, the best novel ever to come out of the Pacific Northwest, that is a shameful and utterly undeserved fate. Living now in the general landscape of the book, I read it at least once a year, always with laughter, recognition and gratitude to Malamud as one of the finest American writers of the last century.
It is a sad fate for a great book to be unknown. But, A New Life is not out of print. In fact, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a version with an introduction by novelist Jonathan Lethem in 2004. You can find new or used copies for sale on Amazon by clicking here.