![]() ![]() Malamud himself was an avid baseball fan and a devotee of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball provides a wonderfully fertile set of American images against which to set the perennial questions of the innately competitive and combative nature of American life and of individual ambition. The book explores the desire to win: to have the best averages, to outrun, outscore, and outfield competitors and teammates. It was an especially apt metaphor with which Malamud could develop his complicated morality play. At the time of the novel’s publication, baseball was still the most popular spectator sport in the United States. To create a truly American story, he used a sport that people loved. But with his first novel, The Natural, he embraced a Midwestern hero, the American pastoral, and a pastime he loved: baseball. In those earlier works, Malamud used Yiddish constructions and transposed Yiddish words reminiscent of that tradition. When Malamud began his first novel, The Natural (1952), he had already earned critical notice for his earliest short stories, written in the Jewish folk tradition of Eastern Europe. Many then add that “Redford was great,” making it clear that they are referring to the film rather than the novel. ![]() When I ask friends about their favorite Malamud novel, they almost always say The Natural. ![]() Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from a chapter on The Natural in a forthcoming book by the author, Bernard Malamud and the Limits of Desire. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |