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If you'd told me when I was in my twenties that I was eventually going to read a novel about a fiftysomething writer who tries to recapture his lost youth by having lots of sex with a woman two years older than his daughter -- and not only endure it for a class or something, but love every sadly hilarious navel-gazing second of it -- I would have told you time travel had fried your brain. I used to have a strong prejudice against middle age men having affairs in fiction.
The strange thing is that I formed this prejudice at a time when I had read exactly zero books about middle-aged affair-havers (Lolita doesn't count). Instead, I had absorbed huge quantities of critical exhaustion with middle-aged affair-havers. A little of it was direct, from sources like David Foster Wallace's famous regretful takedown of John Updike's late fiction, but most of it was just floating around, casual and sourceless. I got the idea that Middle-Aged Intellectual Guy Has Affairs was one of the dominant plots of late 20th century literature, and that the right response to any individual example is to be bored and disgusted. I also found adultery unattractive for my own reasons, because as a reader it invariably just makes me annoyed with the adulterer for not being more easily embarrassed. The latter is still true, but it didn't hurt my enjoyment of Dubin's Lives at all.
William Dubin is a well-known biographer, which is symbolic because it allows him to worry that his own life has been neglected in favor of his stable of geniuses. His wife Kitty is an instantly loveable neurotic who fears fire and dishonesty. The girl he embarks on a "daring" affair with, Fanny Bick, is a wonderfully surly and plausible college dropout, callow and sharp and mixed-up and indifferent to the glowing youthful vitality that obsesses him. Early in the book, he takes Fanny to Venice as a bold romantic gesture and in an attempt to get his lust for her out of his system; she comes down with explosive diahrrea the first time they undress, spends the next two days in the bathroom, then leaves him for a cheesy young tour guide. Just before she leaves, Dubin can tell something's up, because she's suddenly and inexplicably plucked out her chin hairs. This beautiful tour-de-force of bathos set a seal on my heart; it made me willing to forgive even more than I ended up needing to.
Then Dubin goes back to Connecticut and spends months on end obsessing over his missed opportunity, until he and Fanny finally get together. Then he spends months trying to hide it from his wife (so as not to hurt her, because he could never hurt her) and fending off Fanny's attempts to get him to move in with her permanently. There are assorted other affairs and ill-judged gestures, and plots involving Dubin's grown-up son and daughter - lives Dubin would like to understand but is seldom granted access to. Once, he stubbornly goes for a walk in a blizzard (Kitty calls every kind of snow a "blizzard," but this one is real) and gets lost a few feet from the road. He grows old and decrepit and gets a new lease on life and sinks into age again. This "plot" plods hopelessly through the seconds of Dubin's life like a dyspeptic insomniac, but its repetitiveness and frustrations are also a pleasure, because the fretful narration is also funny and kind. Even more of a pleasure is Malamud's loving attention to weather and seasons, which reminded me of the best parts of Lady Chatterly's Lover, the plants and the mud and the chickens -- appropriate because the biography Dubin is struggling with is D.H. Lawrence.
Six more novels to go! Can that really be right? Apparently, yes, if you subtract enough eventually you get alarmingly close to zero.
The strange thing is that I formed this prejudice at a time when I had read exactly zero books about middle-aged affair-havers (Lolita doesn't count). Instead, I had absorbed huge quantities of critical exhaustion with middle-aged affair-havers. A little of it was direct, from sources like David Foster Wallace's famous regretful takedown of John Updike's late fiction, but most of it was just floating around, casual and sourceless. I got the idea that Middle-Aged Intellectual Guy Has Affairs was one of the dominant plots of late 20th century literature, and that the right response to any individual example is to be bored and disgusted. I also found adultery unattractive for my own reasons, because as a reader it invariably just makes me annoyed with the adulterer for not being more easily embarrassed. The latter is still true, but it didn't hurt my enjoyment of Dubin's Lives at all.
William Dubin is a well-known biographer, which is symbolic because it allows him to worry that his own life has been neglected in favor of his stable of geniuses. His wife Kitty is an instantly loveable neurotic who fears fire and dishonesty. The girl he embarks on a "daring" affair with, Fanny Bick, is a wonderfully surly and plausible college dropout, callow and sharp and mixed-up and indifferent to the glowing youthful vitality that obsesses him. Early in the book, he takes Fanny to Venice as a bold romantic gesture and in an attempt to get his lust for her out of his system; she comes down with explosive diahrrea the first time they undress, spends the next two days in the bathroom, then leaves him for a cheesy young tour guide. Just before she leaves, Dubin can tell something's up, because she's suddenly and inexplicably plucked out her chin hairs. This beautiful tour-de-force of bathos set a seal on my heart; it made me willing to forgive even more than I ended up needing to.
Then Dubin goes back to Connecticut and spends months on end obsessing over his missed opportunity, until he and Fanny finally get together. Then he spends months trying to hide it from his wife (so as not to hurt her, because he could never hurt her) and fending off Fanny's attempts to get him to move in with her permanently. There are assorted other affairs and ill-judged gestures, and plots involving Dubin's grown-up son and daughter - lives Dubin would like to understand but is seldom granted access to. Once, he stubbornly goes for a walk in a blizzard (Kitty calls every kind of snow a "blizzard," but this one is real) and gets lost a few feet from the road. He grows old and decrepit and gets a new lease on life and sinks into age again. This "plot" plods hopelessly through the seconds of Dubin's life like a dyspeptic insomniac, but its repetitiveness and frustrations are also a pleasure, because the fretful narration is also funny and kind. Even more of a pleasure is Malamud's loving attention to weather and seasons, which reminded me of the best parts of Lady Chatterly's Lover, the plants and the mud and the chickens -- appropriate because the biography Dubin is struggling with is D.H. Lawrence.
Six more novels to go! Can that really be right? Apparently, yes, if you subtract enough eventually you get alarmingly close to zero.
