The Tenants Book

ETA: I keep thinking about the book. Two things I want to add. I believe the author's intention was to illustrate how disfavored minority groups, rather than uniting and fighting together for a common cause, fight instead against each other. Unfortunately, other themes dilute the message! The abrupt, brutal and exaggerated ending, which I dislike, points in this direction. Malamud probably wanted to close the book with a bang, but I found the ending melodramatic and unrealistic.

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This novel has the feel of a short story, but a short story I had trouble making sense of. What is its message? I am not quite sure.

Here is the set-up. A thirty-six-year-old author, Harry Lesser, lives in a tenement which the landlord, Levenspiel, wants to demolish. The tenement is to be replaced by more profitable office buildings. He cannot throw Lesser out because of rent controlled housing regulations. Levenspiel offers Lesser larger and larger amounts of money if he will just pick himself up and leave. Lesser refuses. He insists that he cannot alter his writing routine; he can only finish the novel where he had begun writing it. He has been working on the novel for the last nine years. I will say right off the bat that I find this reasoning insane. The huge sum of money offered if he moves would provide him with much better accommodations, accommodations more conductive to writing. The tenement has no water or heat, except for those short intervals after he complains. Toilets do not function.

Lesser is the sole tenant remaining, until the day he hears someone plonking away at a typewriter. Another "author" has installed himself in the building. This we learn is Willie Spearmint. In prison Willie came to love books. Now he is determined to write about black power and resistance. Lesser is white and Jewish, as is the landlord. Lesser's book is a novel about love. There arises a rivalry between Lesser and Willie, not only over writing but a girl too. Willie has a white girlfriend. And both being writers, a friendship of sorts develops.

There is the layout of the story. We watch what happens.

What is delivered is a messy mix of assorted topics.

Wiki says that when Malamud was asked what "set off" the writing of his novel, he replied: "Jews and blacks, the period of the troubles in New York City; the teachers strike, the rise of black activism, the mix-up of cause and effect. I thought I'd say a word."

What Malamud is saying is NOT clear to me! Is the book about the art and struggle of writing, about Jewish and racial discrimination, about deplorable housing, about landlords' greed for profits or an overall criticism of life in poor areas of NYC at the end of the 1960s? What is the underlying message of the book?! That is what I want to know. The alternatives are not properly followed through. In my view, the art and struggle of writing is the theme I would say the book is most about.

Neither do I like the writing. First of all, the language is crude. Downright filthy. One might argue that it must be this way given the people about which the story is written. With this I agree and have thus grudgingly given the book two rather than one star. Secondly, the prose is choppy. Thirdly, there are sections where one word is repeated over and over again. Is repetition of one word the best way for an author to make himself understood? I hope you hear my intended sarcasm.

If a book must use sordid language to accurately describe events and characters, then at least the message to be conveyed must be clear.

The audiobook is narrated by L.J. Ganser. In the dialogues one cannot hear who is speaking. This makes following the story sometimes confusing. The words are clearly spoken and the speed with which the story is read are fine. For me the narration performance is merely OK. It should not be that hard for a professional narrator to distinguish between an angry, down and out, Black seeking revenge, a Jewish landlord and a white, educated, Jewish author having two published books to his name, currently working on his third.

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The Assistant 4 stars
Dubin's Lives 4 stars
The Fixer 4 stars
A New Life 3 stars
My Father Is a Book 2 stars
The Tenants 2 stars
Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life TBR