The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1966)
Going to the heart of the matter


“[The tea] tasted bitter and he blamed existence.” Is it necessary to write of the Old World’s wry melancholy after this sentence, from Malamud’s epic account of a shtetl Jew’s moral awakening after a false accusation of blood libel? (“Who invented my life?” goes another immortal line.) Keep your sybaritic Rothian heat, your Bellovian prolixity and self-scratching cerebralism, and give me the wilted flesh (and blood), the bone-rattling cold, the granite-like prose of a Malamud novel. Malamud is slipping from this sacred Jewish triumvirate, and unjustly so: As The Fixer reminds us, Roth and Bellow are mortal; Malamud is the Bible.
Boris Fishman is the author of the novels Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, A Replacement Life, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes.
Boris Fishman’s new novel, The Unwanted, will be published by HarperCollins in March 2025. He teaches creative writing and literature at The University of Austin