Meh. A Jew and a Black are writers and they hate each other and they treat women like objects. Yawn. What happened, Malamud? ( )

"Scrivo bene ma parlo male, pensò. Scrivo bene perché faccio tante revisioni. Quello che dico non posso correggerlo e spesso è sbagliato."

The plot sways from amusing to funny to dark and deeply serious. A book about writers and writing and also race. ( )

In this short novel, Lesser is a man digging his heels in. His landlord wants him out so he can demolish the apartment block and finally make some money out if his land, but Lesser cannot comprehend moving anywhere until he finishes the novel he has been working on for a decade.
Consequently, Lesser is the last tenant and so diligently writes away each day in a spooky rat-warren that attracts various miscreants and drifters. Enter Willy. Willy is a militant supporter of black rights and also a writer. He resides in a vacant apartment and eventually the two form a relationship that can loosely be termed friendship.

There is a lot going on in their relationship that I cannot relate to, racial slurs, verbal attacks, lying, cheating, theiving, and then some. Initially it just didn't seem credible that they would even spend time together. It was Lesser's loneliness and Willie's desire for writing advice that threw them together. Needless to say, the Jew and the black (as they refer to each other) have a tumultuous relationship. Throw in a woman (or 'bitch' as they refer to her!!) and things quickly disintegrate. As the novel went on, I found myself getting to know Lesser more and more and I finally felt like I could picture him. The interactions he had with Willy, who was temperamental to say the least, were cleverly written and displayed the tact and tentativeness that were required by Lesser in order that Willy not fly off the handle. It is, I suppose, a metaphor for human relations. As such, it paints a pretty dire picture for us lot as a whole. But, it was gritty, dark and real. And I liked it. ( )

Perhaps I should've read Malamud's works in order, because I just jumped through time into a completely different author. I've read Malamud's first two books and loved them; I even loved the crazy debut novel about baseball for crying out loud. Then I stepped over five other books and landed in the 1970s. 1970's Malamud is not the same as 1950's Malamud. Gone is the easygoing, beautiful prose that glimmers; in its place is a noisy, experimental tale that felt more like cocaine on the brain. Hey, it was the seventies.

Had I not known this was written by Malamud, I wouldn't have had the faintest idea from the writing. Maybe I should pretend it wasn't Malamud and approach it as an unknown author. There's some wonderful conflict in this story. The novel is largely about two writers at war with one another. Now, I roll my eyes almost anytime a story is written about writers, but I'll grant each and every author one token to play the writer card (but only one). The characters themselves are sort of cliché, but I think the author did a wonderful job making them believable and original within their caricatures.

Truth is, this story is all over the place. I couldn't tell what was dreams, what was imagined, what was novel. Did any of this really happen? Was some of what I read the novel that was being written by one of these imagined writers? Were there even two writers, or was this all merely the internal struggle of one writer? The author of The Tenants seems angry, confused, and hopeless, a person with a negative view of the world. And this is not how I remember Malamud.

So back to Malamud: I get the feeling that maybe this was a very personal story for the author. I get a sense that maybe his own personal life and writing life were unraveling. There's a sense that everything is falling apart, not only for these characters, but for the author as well. And maybe that wasn't the case, and if so, Malamud did a wonderful job painting chaos without having to be submersed in it. I don't know, I'm just trying to find the positive. Knowing this is Malamud, it sort of sucked, but even if I didn't have preconceived notions of the author, I still would've found The Tenants to be jarring, strained, and little more than okay. So, that being that case, I have decided to get back in my time machine and journey to the year I left off at: 1958. Maybe by the time I read through the sixties, 1970s Malamud will make complete sense. Or maybe it would be better to skip over the seventies altogether. ( )