Dubin's Lives by Bernard Malamud

First published: 1979

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Center Campobello, a small town in upstate New York

Principal Characters:

• William Dubin, a biographer experiencing a life crisis
• Kitty Dubin, his wife of some twenty years
• Fanny Bick, a young woman who is Dubin’s lover
• Maud, Kitty and Dubin’s daughter
• Gerald, Kitty’s son and Dubin’s adopted son

The Novel

Dubin’s Lives chronicles the story of Dubin, a man in his mid-fifties who is undergoing a life crisis. As a biographer who has studied the content of lives, he tries to redirect his own life. Dubin has always been much influenced by the lives he has studied. As the novel opens, he is writing about D. H. Lawrence. As he assimilates Lawrence, he becomes imbued with Lawrence’s sense of the preeminence of the force of sex. Looking to find passion and to change his life, Dubin falls in love with the young housekeeper whom his wife has hired. They talk to each other, and after he gives her a copy of his first work, Short Lives, she returns the favor by coming into his study, taking off her clothes, and offering herself to him. While he rejects this opportunity out of respect for his wife, he looks for an occasion to have an extended time with her and invites her to spend a week with him in Venice, telling his wife that he is going to research the erotic Lawrence. Once in Venice, Fanny gets a stomach flu. When she recovers, they plan to meet and make love. Dubin, however, arrives late for their meeting, having followed a young woman and an old man whom he believes must be his daughter and her lover. When he gives up the search, he arrives at the hotel to find the now robust Fanny making love with a young gondolier, a comic scene that makes Dubin appear like the cuckolded old husband in a tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.

This fiasco starts cycles of despair and writer’s block, which Dubin deals with through a strict regimen of rigorous dieting and exercise. Two intervals of despair, which coincide with winter, are followed by intervals of vitality, which coincide with spring, when he reconnects with Fanny. They first make love in a meadow of wild flowers, and his passionate relationship with her frees his spirit and enables him to write again.

While his relationship with Fanny and his work with Lawrence preoccupy Dubin, other aspects of his life also concern him. His relationship with his wife, Kitty, suffers from his boredom with his married life and from his guilt about his affair. This guilt manifests itself in his impotence with Kitty, which embarrasses and humiliates him. Dubin is also concerned about his relationship with his children, both of whom are now beyond the realm of his influence. His adopted son, Gerald, has distanced himself from his parents and has resumed the name of his natural father. Dubin and Kitty’s daughter, Maud, is involved in a relationship that parallels Dubin’s with Fanny and provokes feelings of both jealousy and guilt in Dubin.

In time, Fanny seeks a fuller relationship with Dubin, buying the farm next door to him and raising goats. Dubin thrives on loving her in this earthy setting that evokes Lawrence. Nevertheless, he cannot let go of his wife and home, and he establishes himself in the barn in a renovated study with a bed, equidistant from each woman. As Fanny now looks to Dubin for guidance, he clearly becomes a father substitute for her. He lovingly helps her direct her life, recalling his inability to influence his daughter. Paradoxically, as he moves into a full and intimate relationship with Fanny, he understands that he must choose between the two women. He returns to his wife stimulated by the lust he feels for Fanny. In the background waits Roger Foster, Dubin’s rival for Fanny. The postscript of the novel tells that Dubin does finish the Lawrence book, that he writes a book on the art of biography indicating that he has discovered how to gain the appropriate distance from his subject, and that with his daughter, who now has a Spanish surname, he has written a book on the daughter of Sigmund Freud.

The Characters

The characters of Malamud’s novel serve to present different aspects of Dubin’s life as a husband, father, lover, and biographer and to demonstrate his struggle to live his life fully and responsibly. Dubin, the sometimes comic biographer, reflects the universal and continuous struggle one has with the self. Dubin determines to ensure that his own life is a rich and full one. Motivated by his subjects, he struggles to come to terms with his own life, the lives he writes about, and their impact on his life.

Fanny Bick is associated with sensuality. She is pictured with fruits: Her orange-colored car has a half-eaten peach and a half-eaten pear on the a seat, and she throws lemon-colored panties at Dubin. She embodies the principle of sexuality that Dubin wishes to integrate into his life. Later, she becomes someone he loves and to whom he is committed, one of two women between whom Dubin must choose.

Kitty, Dubin’s intelligent, caring, and patient wife, waits out his moods and his impotence, supporting him and encouraging him and yet driving him crazy. Less spontaneous than Fanny, she fears unexpected death. Kitty experienced romantic love in her first marriage and has looked for and found in marriage to Dubin a satisfying, productive relationship. She learns of his affair but waits to see what he will do.

Gerald, Dubin’s adopted son, is undergoing his own life crisis. Having deserted from the Army when his tour of duty in Vietnam came up, he lives abroad, feeling estranged from his parents and unable to make a decision about his life.

Maud, the daughter of Kitty and William, has dropped out of college after a year, having become involved with her Spanish professor, a married man her father’s age. She has become pregnant with the professor’s child. She plans to have the child and live in New York City, determining, unlike Gerald, to make choices and live with them.

Critical Context

Dubin’s Lives, Malamud’s second-to-last novel, explores themes that recur in all of his fiction. The most pervasive theme is that of self-understanding and moral choices. In all of his novels from The Natural (1952) through Dubin’s Lives, the protagonists, given their respective fates, struggle to find their places in the world. These protagonists tend to be ordinary men representing Everyman. Comic actions, like those in The Assistant (1957) when Frank Alpine falls into a grave and in Dubin’s Lives when Dubin climbs a tree fleeing first a dog and then its angry owner, show earnest, foolish, often pathetic heroes trying to find their way out of their woes.

Malamud’s characters do have their woes. They are usually outsiders, often victims who recognize the unfairness of their situations yet come to understand the choices they must make in order to get their lives in order. These choices are not the more comfortable ones. Roy Hobbs in The Natural chooses incorrectly; Frank in The Assistant learns what discipline and pain it takes to choose correctly. Dubin shows that even a man who has chosen correctly in the past to overcome a debilitating childhood must still choose correctly again.

Jewishness is an issue in all Malamud’s fiction. For Malamud, all men are Jews, for as his fiction shows, the Jews paradoxically are both the Chosen People and the outcasts. All of his explorations are about what it means to be human. Dubin’s Jewishness is not emphasized, but the novel’s concern is with the tenet of Jewish belief described by Martin Buber as the “I/Thou” relationship. Jewishness also manifests itself in the way Frank Alpine in The Assistant, S. Levin in A New Life (1961), Yakov Bok in The Fixer (1966) (a work for which Malamud won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award), and Dubin learn through suffering and love. Malamud’s preoccupation with the psychic effects of the Holocaust echo in Kitty’s fear of death and gas burners.

Story clarified by technique is typical of Malamud. In Dubin’s Lives, Malamud moves closer than ever to such novelists as Henry James and Virginia Woolf as he describes inner life, psychological states, and intimate interactions. He dramatizes a marriage in decline and shows inward states of confusion and despair by tying them to frenzied action and icy winter. This exploration of a later stage of life does indeed show Malamud’s lifelong concern with the attempt to live not only a full life but also a responsible one.

Bibliography

Abramson, Edward. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Chapters analyze each novel; the chapter on Dubin’s Lives identifies its strengths and weaknesses.

Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field, eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975. Contains a chronology, an interview with Malamud, essays on themes prevalent among Jewish writers, and a consideration of Malamud’s ironic heroes.

Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. An excellent introduction to Malamud’s fiction. Explains recurring themes and style, synthesizing major criticism. Annotated bibliography.

Hershinow, Sheldon. Bernard Malamud. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Treats all of Malamud’s novels. Particularly important for its analysis of the structure of Dubin’s Lives.

Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Contains provocative essays on all of Malamud’s novels. “The Perverse Economy’ of Malamud’s Art: A Lacanian Reading of Dubin’s Lives,” by James M. Mellard, describes psychoanalytic themes in Dubin’s Lives.