Seven Oaks Magazine.

Reviewers are being strangely harsh on Janna Malamud Smith’s memoir of her father, the American novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-86), and I don’t know why. My Father Is a Book (Thomas Allen & Son, $31.95) is on balance an affectionate and touching memoir and, what’s more important, an honest one. The honesty extends to the usual miscommunication between child and parent, the sort that never quite disappears but only changes shape as the child grows and the parent ages.

The author’s struggle to resolve this dilemma suggests — what’s the cliché? — that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. “Honesty,” she writes, “is such a basic theme in my father’s work that it likely had multiple meanings for him. In the course of The Assistant, Frank Alpine transforms himself from a petty crook to a man struggling to live honestly. Storytelling itself lives precariously beside more literal truth. It bothered Dad his whole life that his father had once called him a ‘bluffer’ for inflating details of a tale.”

All his books—even the first and least typical one, The Natural, about the interior life, such as it is, of a professional baseball player—wrestle with how to grow as a human being by living through various moral dilemmas. Think of The Fixer (1967), in which a Jew falsely imprisoned in czarist Russia rises above his condition, emerging as more powerful than his captors: a book that, like The Natural, was taken up by Hollywood enthusiastically.

When he was writing The Fixer, Malamud, who was born in the U.S. to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine, had to travel from Kiev to Moscow to see what the countryside looked like, for the experience of the shtetls, which he was so close to emotionally, was also completely foreign to him in reality. He’d grown up in Brooklyn in a small shop with his mother who went mad and a brother also devoured by mental illness. When The Natural was a big success in 1952, he took a college teaching job in Corvallis, Oregon. So it was that his daughter “was born in a small, neat, western American town, with its expansive vistas and neighborly, frontier, Protestant potluck ways.”

She came of age believing “that Dad had to leave Brooklyn and his family before he could write freely.” Later she realised that he “saw Corvallis as an exile’s way station. Almost as soon as he arrived, he began looking for grants, fellowships, and other positions that might allow him to leave.” Always yearning for a time, place or experience he hadn’t known or had fled, he neutralised his inner turmoil through his work. The author—whose mother was the child of Italian immigrants—recalls how “one day some years back, I tried on a dress in a shop in Naples and suddenly realized that it fit me as no American clothing ever had. The knowledge unsettled me, made me feel as if I belonged somewhere, that my body inscribed me as part of a tribe. The Italian tribe, the Russian Jewish tribe, who could say?” She had discovered the sense of inherent dislocation given such a powerful voice by Malamud and the other the great Jewish American novelists of the Second World War generation.

I suspect that part of the critical reception being given My Father Is a Book comes from comparison, whether conscious or otherwise, with Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark, her 1984 memoir of her own father, the novelist John Cheever, with its tender discussion of his alcoholism and closeted homosexuality. Susan Cheever is a fine writer. Janna Malamud Smith is a clinical social worker by profession (there’s that apple and that tree again). Her prose style, while more than workmanlike, doesn’t quite come up to the level of Cheever’s but her bite is no less deep or painful.

Malamud eventually got free of Oregon and began teaching at Bennington College, a moneyed liberal arts institution in Vermont, a place where the later 1960s already seemed to be underway even in the decade’s earliest years. So it was that when the author was 11 her father began having an affair with a student, a relationship that eventually settled into a friendship that continued until his death decades later. In retaliation, Mrs. Malamud launched an affair of her own, and even the author began a years-long emotional amour with one of her teachers.

In My Father Is a Book, the author still can’t forgive her father’s lover. “Was she the second wife or the incestuously accomplished second daughter?” she asks. Her bitterness of course must be seen against the background of her own relationship with her father, which was changing on its own, in the natural course of things. “He gulped down my little girl admiration, I his fatherly delight,” she writes. “But we became touchy and awkward when, as I grew up, I sought to free myself. Father/female child we grasped; father/woman baffled each of us in different ways. We did not trust that I could go and stay. I think he feared that I would try to depart from him completely. I feared that he would somehow tether me. I found his need for me oppressive, felt angry at his oversize, insistent presence. Early in my adulthood, I had a dreamlike vision of him as a large hot-air balloon, at once lifting the family and consuming all our heat to fire his updraft.”

She tries her best to analyze him in order to discover his secrets. She finds that he lived inside the complexities and insecurities that seeded his fiction and that, what’s more, and putting aside normal family angst, he was a caring father. She writes: “The moral education Dad offered was constant: read, value art, seek education and experience, attend to others, shelter the vulnerable, and try to treat each person fairly. The underlying biggie was, ‘Work to overcome yourself.’” Certainly he was a dedicated artist whose “characters struggle to live as moral human beings and good men…Who hurts whom and how? What choices can a man make in living to contain the damage he does both in the public world and to intimates? Where can he turn for guidance? What can he learn, even gain, from suffering?”

When he was dying, she had mostly come to terms with the intricacies of their relationship—mostly but not entirely. Having inherited the honesty gene, she can write this: “Not knowing close death, I was, in that first instant, uncertain whether I would survive his. Sometimes I had longed for him to die: to free me of him, to make the burden of fearful waiting end.”

When he was in his creative prime, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Malamud was considered part of the troika of novelists writing about the Jewish experience in America, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. With his death, the trio “became a dyad.” One reason his reputation has not been restored is that “biographies are a way we designate writers as significant and keep their fiction alive” and in this case the widow and daughter kept fending off those who wished to write his story. Now the Malamud estate has come round to giving a biographer access to needed material. Perhaps as a result of that book as well as of this one, we’ll soon see a rise in the stock price. Hope so.

Another new memoir with great heart is The Last Street Before Cleveland: An Accidental Pilgrimage by Joe Mackall (US$24.95), part of the perhaps unique series from the University of Nebraska Press called “Class in America.” This narrative of working-class life in the old heavy-manufacturing culture begins in the late 1990s when the author returns to his former neighbourhood to attend the funeral of a friend who’s died far too young. It becomes a journey through the landscape of rusted-out industrialism, scorned faith and substance abuse. A bit repetitious, especially for a book of only 150 pages, but powerfully imagined and poetically told.

George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books). He is the editor of The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs (Vintage Canada, 2001).