Sylvester is a novelist and editor who once traveled as a sportswriter with the Brooklyn Dodgers.In his Dictionary of Literary Biography article on Bernard Malamud, Joel Salzberg notes that the author "holds a preeminence among Jewish-American writers that has consistently been reaffirmed by recent critical assessments." Malamud, however, began his career with his popular first novel, The Natural, influenced by his love of baseball and his fascination with stories of the mythological quest for the Holy Grail. In his tellingĪnd always deliberate use of the vernacular alternated with passages evocative and almost lyrical, in his almost entirely successful relation of baseball in detail to the culture which elaborated it, Malamud has made a brilliant and unusual Malamud also draws heavily on baseball legend and history, almost interchangeably.Īll the story is here of a natural man - hurt badly by his first love, recovering late for his profession, almost achieving greatness, then distracted or betrayed by people or objects or events all equated with elements in our environment.
As when Hobbs, baitedīy a dwarf in the stands, drives one liner after another, deliberately foul, at the cowering little man. But Malamud has a mission and we grant him certain privileges, including the use of the super-realism he alternates with naturalism.
Whose names sometimes indicate their symbolism, sometimes deliberately obscure it. This he does despite various distractions by people National League and, with a trick bat not unlike that used by Heinie Groh of the Cincinnati Reds back in the Twenties - almost single-handed leads the team into a tie for first place. He is shot by a girl in a hotel room and drops out of sight until, at the age of 34, he returns to the last place team in the The book's hero, Roy Hobbs, comes out of the West at the age of 19, brought to a major league training camp by a scout. "natural" player who operates with ease and the greatest skill, without having been taught is equated with the natural man who, left alone by, say, politicians and advertising agencies, might achieve his real fulfillment. What he has done is to contrive a sustained and elaborate allegory in which the For Bernard Malamud's interests go far beyond baseball. It's an unusually fine novel, too, although I don't know how the professionals are going to take it. That novel has finally been written and if the author does not come from the ranks of baseball reporters, at least he hails from Brooklyn and there are those who feel that qualifies Number would ever produce a serious novel about baseball.
By Harry Sylvester The Natural By Bernard Malamud.Īck in the Thirties the baseball writers making the swing through the West with major league teams occasionally wondered whether one of their
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