The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

I picked this book up for 50%, maybe even 75% off at a Borders clearance, because no one else had claimed it yet, because it looked possibly important, because Bernard Malamud is an author I haven't read but feel like I ought, although I never felt like I ought to until I actually saw this book on the emptying shelves. It's a book that might very well have languished on my bookshelf thereafter, unread and gathering dust, but for after immersing myself in graphic novels and Stephen King, I felt the need for something that made me feel like I was reading literature that made me work. I don't necessarily believe that good literature has to make you work (or feel like you're working for it). I don't believe you need to run ten miles a day to stay healthy. But sometimes I like to get in a good ten mile run, and sometimes I like a bit of a reading workout.

That said, The Assistant wasn't exactly a slog. Actually, I thought it was a very real, very beautifully written book, and by beautifully written I guess I mean it didn't seem to try very hard to be beautifully written, and still managed to capture the inner and outer lives of its characters in all their complexity.

The story is fairly simple, covering a few months, maybe as long as a year, in the life of a Jewish immigrant running a small, slowly-failing grocery in a neighborhood of New York. A young Italian-American comes into the picture, asking to work as an assistant in the grocery, hoping to get a jump start on his life. The story revolves around both the inner lives of all four characters, and the relationships among them, and is incredibly rich and straightforward, and sad. I don't know that Malamud put great effort, or at least not obvious effort, into painting the scenery, but every time I picked up the book I felt like I could see the grocery, the small apartments above it, the street outside, the faces of the major and minor characters. I felt like I lived there momentarily.

The story was, in the end, more tragic than I had expected or hoped, but still did not end on a bitter note and leave me depressed. I found myself unable to draw a quick conclusion about whether I liked the book once I finished. This usually means I will decide I liked the book, because it means it left a mark.