Malamud's The Assistant Reading Order

Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1957) is his most fully realized novel and one of the great American novels of the mid-twentieth century — a portrayal of the relationship between Morris Bober, an elderly Jewish immigrant grocer in Brooklyn who has failed at business all his life and who faces his failure with a kind of moral dignity that the novel treats as heroic, and Frank Alpine, an Italian-American drifter who initially helps to rob Morris and then, in obscure penitence, begins working in his store and eventually falling in love with his daughter Helen. Malamud was interested in what he called 'the human necessity to love and suffer' — a specifically Jewish-inflected vision of life as obligation, as duty to endure with grace what cannot be changed. The novel is about the strange transferability of moral character: Frank Alpine is not Jewish but he absorbs from Morris Bober a Jewish moral sensibility that transforms him. The novel ends with Frank's conversion, which Malamud treats without irony as a kind of completion. Malamud won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and The Assistant is his finest sustained achievement — less technically experimental than Saul Bellow, less sexually explicit than Philip Roth, but in its way the most morally serious of the mid-century Jewish-American novelists.