Dubin's Lives Book

If you're a man looking to be more attractive to the ladies and aren't having much luck, perhaps one tactic to consider is changing one's profession in the hope that some professions may be considered "sexier" than others. I'm sure we can all think of some candidates and while a certain facet of the movie industry might try to convince us that "handyman in the summer" is a viable option, perhaps a left-field possibility for those of us not blessed with six-packs could be . . . biographer?

Not just "biographer" but "middle-aged biographer", which is the mental leap that Malamud requires us to make in the course of reading this novel. And while the concept itself might elicit a raised eyebrow from a reader perhaps more slightly versed in reality, I have to say he does a pretty good job of at least making the scenario seem plausible and grounded in something resembling the real world.

His next to last novel (and depending on who you talk to, his last good one) and the longest of his that I've read so far, it concerns the writer William Dubin. A lawyer in his much younger days, he eventually took to writing and has published several successful biographies (and received an award from LBJ for his work on a Thoreau biography), the latest of which is a work in progress on DH Lawrence, he of the shockingly sexy novels because everyone in pre-WWII England seemed to believe that babies came from wishing very hard and no one ever touched each other ever, or even wanted to. He's having some trouble getting his notes together for the book, made worse by worries about money, his wife's neuroses and the idea of getting older as a man in his late fifties.

Then his wife hires a new cleaning lady, twenty-something Fanny, who doesn't mind finding excuses to not clean in order to talk to Dubin, who equally doesn't mind having an attractive young woman chat with him. Well, as you can imagine one thing leads to another and its off to the races we go, only lacking clothes.

Something that I've found Malamud is good at is this ability to construct a world, limited perhaps in its scope but one that still complete, around his characters so what they inhabit feels like a piece, informed and shaped by their own concerns and cares with still enough surprises remaining that they have to constantly react to the ground shifting beneath them. The length of the book seems to give him the room to stretch out into a more deliberate pace (not that he's a pulse-pounding writer but the shorter stuff feels positively feverish compared to this) and with the added space to improvise he finds ways to stretch out. This is the first Malamud novel that feels international, as Dubin for various reasons winds up globetrotting to Venice and Stockholm and the changes in scenery help break up a novel that essentially has to keep you interested in a man's attempts to have his woman and his other woman at the same time.

It's a premise we've all read and seen (and perhaps, unfortunately, experienced) all too often and while I don't know if Malamud does anything groundbreaking here (not for nothing, its still an older man with a much younger woman . . . come on, Bernard, if "All That Heaven Allows" could pull it off in the mid-fifties, so could you!) what he does continue to excel at is creating characters that feel like they bring the sum total of their experiences, even the ones we're not privy to, to the decisions they make and actions they take, so that the plot of the novel, such as it is, feels more organic than anything else. Its not plot-twisty kind of story so if you intend to read this on the edge of your seat to see if Bernard and Fanny are able to pull off their latest tryst or if Dubin will manage to finish his book before all the women in his life exhaust him, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Those concerns factor into the book but its more of a gradual unfolding, as Dubin and his wife Kitty and their kids and their neighbors and Fanny all interact in various combinations, creating this push-pull feel that drives the novel.

This sort of relaxed attitude makes it highly contemplative, either in Dubin's thoughts as he goes on his many long walks, or in the conversations he has with the people in his life. Everyone's attempting to understand themselves or understand everyone else or make themselves understood, whether its his college age daughter's search for love, or their son's struggle with being an overseas deserter during the Vietnam War era, or Fanny's desire to figure out what she wants out of life . . . everyone is trying, maybe not very well and maybe hurting other people in the course of that trying but still making the attempt. A lot of the book seems devoted to people measuring the gap between where they'd thought they'd be and where they are and how feasible it is to cross it in the time they think they have remaining and trying to decide what degree of acceptance they're willing to live with. They try to ignite, they try to recapture, they try to break out and if none of that works as well as they'd hoped it would, you have to wonder if its because their plans aren't as well thought out as they could be or if that's just how the world is.

Throughout the novel there's a sense of history that I like, the gradual accumulation of not only the events in your own life but the lives of those who came before and how that weight can still warp the present day if you let it, and always will to some extent no matter how much you try to avoid it. It's a novel that feels like everyone has lived before the book started and will keep going on when its finished, and this is just the period of their lives that we're peeking in on. It gives some conversations extra weight, like the discussions between Dubin and his wife about their marriage. On the one hand they feel fraught with the sort of tension that arrives when matters are near coming apart but on the other hand it's a feint of sorts . . . it only feels frayed because it's the first time we're seeing these discussions. Attitudes and quirks that everyone has gotten used to are new to us (I think Malamud overdoes it on Kitty's obsessions but it may be a casualty of the novel's length because we see so much of it) and to an extent that's part of the fun, watching people put on an old play with some new guest actors that haven't totally memorized their lines. That sense that things are just enough out of joint to throw comfortable chaos out of whack made the book go quickly for me and I found it as absorbing as his other novels. At the end it still feels unsettled, which I think is the only conclusion you can have to something like this . . . it may resolve well, but chances are it won't and if you keep hoping you'll get to a point where you'll know for sure, you may find certainty is always hovering both too close and just out of reach and by the time you reach that certainty it may be too late for the knowing to matter.