God's Grace by Bernard Malamud

First published: 1982

Type of plot: Apocalyptic

Time of work: The future

Locale: A tropical island

Principal Characters:

• Calvin Cohn, the only survivor of a nuclear destruction
• God, who communicates briefly with Cohn
• Buz, a chimpanzee who has been taught to speak
• George, a gorilla
• Mary Madelyn, the only female chimpanzee on the island
• Esau, a very aggressive chimpanzee
• Melchior, the oldest chimpanzee
• Luke, and
• Saul of Tarsus, twin chimpanzees

The Novel

God’s Grace begins directly after all living beings have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. One person, Calvin Cohn, a Jewish paleontologist, has survived because he was deep undersea in a submersible craft. Coming to the surface, he realizes that a giant flood has covered the earth. God speaks to Cohn, telling him that he survived because of a “minuscule error” on God’s part. Calvin too will be destroyed, God tells him, but not yet.

Returning to his mother ship, the Rebekah Q, Cohn discovers a young chimpanzee. Exploring the ship further, he finds that the chimp had belonged to a scientist named Walther Bunder, who had taught it sign language. Bunder had named the chimp Gottlob, but Cohn re-names him Buz after one of Abraham’s nephews. The chimp seems to understand Cohn’s efforts to communicate, which heartens him greatly.

As the waters recede, Cohn and Buz find an island and bring what they can salvage from the ship. Cohn finds a cave and works hard to make a dwelling there. Soon he suffers severe radiation sickness and is close to unconscious for some time. During his sickness, he is cared for by a presence; food and water are brought to him regularly. Upon recovering, he discovers a large gorilla who has evidently been his caretaker. Cohn names the gorilla George.

Sometime later, Cohn makes the amazing discovery that Bunder had performed surgery on Buz that has made him capable of human speech. Delighted, Cohn immediately begins tutoring Buz in vocabulary and theology. He learns that Bunder had Christianized Buz, had given him a crucifix, and had told him of Jesus of Nazareth. Cohn, son of a cantor, wishes Buz to be Jewish. He tells him many Old Testament stories; Buz likes the Abraham and Isaac story the best. At Cohn’s suggestion, Buz calls him Dod, the closest he can get to Dad. Their relationship is indeed similar to that of father and son.

Some months later, Cohn and Buz discover several other chimpanzees living on the island. Buz gets to know them and teaches them human speech. He also gives them names: Mary Madelyn, Esau, Luke, Saul of Tarsus, and Melchior. Cohn decides to have a Seder, a festive meal thanking God for their deliverance. All the chimps are invited, and they take turns responding to the ritual questions.

Cohn believes that it is his responsibility to teach and care for the chimps, so he establishes a school tree in which they all sit while he tells them stories. They become very fluent, and their various personalities develop. Cohn, acting as a patriarch, eventually writes seven Admonitions (he does not believe he is entitled to call them Commandments) and posts them on the cliff where all can see them.

Mary Madelyn appears to be reaching maturity. Buz and Esau both find her attractive and wish to mate with her. Cohn also desires her, believing that if they mate, Mary Madelyn’s offspring will be the beginning of a new race. She also desires him and eventually offers herself to him. Cohn makes her a white dress. The chimps are enraged and jealous. Eight months later, the baby is born, a hairy white female who is part chimpanzee and part human. Calvin names her Rebekah Islanda and sees her as a sign of great hope.

Although Cohn has made every effort to civilize the chimps, they return to their original natures, killing and eating a baboon. This occasion signals the beginning of the unraveling of the entire society. The chimps kill and eat other baboons; they lose the social structure and all of the teachings that Cohn had imposed upon them. Led by Esau, they invade Cohn’s cave and steal the baby Rebekah, eventually killing her. Cohn goes to Buz, the most influential of the chimps, and takes away his gift of speech by snapping the wires in his neck that had made the speech possible. With this action, the other chimps lose the ability to speak as well.

The chimps destroy all of Cohn’s belongings, take him prisoner, and reenact the Abraham and Isaac story, with Cohn as Isaac. At the end of the novel, George the gorilla, wearing a yarmulke belonging to Cohn, begins a Kaddish for Calvin Cohn.

The Characters

Calvin Cohn, the only human character in the novel, is complex. His Jewish heritage is important to him; he reveres the memory of his father, the cantor; he carries his Pentateuch; he recites his prayers. He is disturbed by the fact that Buz has been Christianized by Bunder, the scientist who taught him to speak, and he discourages Buz when the chimp wishes to speak of Jesus. In his exchanges with God, Cohn shows reverence and a feisty spirit. He has a wryly humorous point of view.

Realizing that he is the sole surviving human, Cohn becomes a sort of Robinson Crusoe, assuming the role of caretaker and captain. His attempts to educate the chimps show his conviction that he must save some race, even if not the human race; his desire to mate with Mary Madelyn comes from his conviction that life must continue. He is fortunate to have vast knowledge in a number of areas—the plays of William Shakespeare, music, science, Jewish history, and theology.

Cohn’s flaw lies in his eagerness to be not only Adam but also Moses, leading his people, the chimps, from slavery into freedom. In this desire, he calls them away from their own natures into humanlike behavior: speaking English, attending school, wearing clothes, observing Jewish rituals. In each of these areas, Cohn is the master, a near-God. Like Moses, he brings his Admonitions and promulgates them for the community. Unlike Moses, he creates them himself.

Buz, the other major character, begins as Cohn’s son; Cohn refers to him as his “lad” and asks Buz to call him “Dad” (Buz pronounces it “Dod”). Buz combines a high degree of intelligence with common sense. In almost archetypal fashion, Buz gradually resents his father, eventually challenges him, and, at the end of the novel, claims the position of Alpha ape and leads the procession to Cohn’s execution. He seizes what Cohn believes to be his right to name; Cohn had named both the island and Buz, changing his name from Gottlob, which had been given him by Bunder. Buz in his turn names the other chimps, to Cohn’s irritation.

Buz is deeply jealous of Cohn’s claiming of Mary Madelyn, the classic Oedipal experience. When Rebekah is born, Buz steadily distances himself, rarely coming to the cave to visit the baby described by Cohn as his little sister.

Both characters, as well as the others in the novel, are secondary to the overall theme and to Malamud’s desire to explore the familiar notions of a lost race, the bestial in human nature, and the possibility of a new lineage. Nothing is said of Cohn’s life before the destruction; he is a sort of Adam in a new world. All of the other characters—animals—are described from Cohn’s point of view: Mary Madelyn’s ears are “sexy” and Esau is “belligerent,” for example.

Critical Context

God’s Grace is a late novel, published four years before Malamud’s death in 1986. Given Malamud’s literary reputation on the basis of such novels as The Natural (1952) and The Assistant (1957) and his many short stories, God’s Grace was eagerly received and widely reviewed. The novel is, in many ways, Malamud taken to his pessimistic extreme. In many novels, Malamud focuses on a single person, ordinarily a man, who is alone through chance or choice. This protagonist struggles to find a moral self and to act out of that self. In most of his novels, however, the struggle is resolved in some manner, and the protagonist finds a sort of peace.

God’s Grace was judged a disappointment by many reviewers, principally because of its almost unremitting bleakness, but its stylistic achievement, particularly the way in which Malamud both uses and plays with biblical and Jewish lore, won praise. Malamud admitted in more than one interview that he had indeed grown steadily more pessimistic, so the novel remains as a testimony to his own convictions.

Bibliography

America. CXLVII, October 9, 1982, p. 195.

Christian Science Monitor. September 10, 1982, p. B3.

Cronin, Gloria L. “The Complex Irony of Grace: A Study of Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 119-128. Explores the theological design of the novel.

Freese, Peter. “Surviving the End: Apocalypse, Evolution, and Entropy in Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36 (Spring, 1995): 163-176. Finds similarities among the three writers’ use of end-time themes and the questions accompanying them.

Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1985. A good overview of Malamud, with a helpful chapter on God’s Grace that points out biblical and Shakespearean themes.

Library Journal. CVII, July, 1982, p. 1345.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 12, 1982, p. 1.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, August 29, 1982, p. 1.

The New Yorker. LVIII, November 8, 1982, p. 167.

Newsweek. C, September 6, 1982, p. 70.

Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. An excellent collection of essays on Malamud’s various themes and techniques, along with two essays specifically on God’s Grace.

Solotaroff, Robert. Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Although God’s Grace is not specifically treated, this book contains excellent material on Malamud himself, including his thoughts about the bleakness in his fiction.

Times Literary Supplement. October 29, 1982, p. 1188.