The Fixer

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short-story writer, and one of the best-known American Jewish authors of the twentieth century. He wrote slowly and carefully, producing fiction that combines moral seriousness with spare, often lyrical storytelling. His range extended from the baseball allegory of The Natural to the historical persecution of The Fixer and the precarious Brooklyn shopkeeping world of The Assistant. Across these different settings, Malamud repeatedly places flawed or isolated people under social and ethical pressure. Ambition, guilt, poverty, antisemitism, and estrangement matter in his work, but so do the difficult possibilities of cooperation, sacrifice, and redemptive love. His characters often find that survival or renewal depends on recognizing another person’s suffering, including when that person begins as an adversary. This mixture of fable, tragedy, social observation, and close attention to character gives his work its distinctive tension between hardship and moral change.