Dubin's Lives

With a new introduction by Thomas Mallon

Dubin's Lives (1979) is a compassionate and wry commedia, a book praised by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times as Malamud's "best novel since The Assistant. Possibly, it is the best he has written of all."

Its protagonist is one of Malamud's finest characters; prize-winning biographer William Dubin, who learns from lives, or thinks he does: those he writes, those he shares, the life he lives. Now in his later middle age, he seeks his own secret self, and the obsession of biography is supplanted by the obsession of love—love for a woman half is age, who has sought an understanding of her life through his books. Dubin's Lives is a rich, subtle book, as well as a moving tale of love and marriage.

Library Journal

Malamud here introduces us to William Dubin, a popular biographer in his late 50s whose life and work are in a serious slump. LJ's reviewer described this as a "moving, compelling, and deeply personal novel" (LJ 1/15/79).

Concerned with many of the moral and spiritual questions at the heart of the Jewish-American experience, Bernard Malamud brought to his fiction the need to ask serious questions in the guise of compelling, page-turning stories. In stories set in America, Europe and Russia, Malamud s characters speak in a rich, provocative language that captures the ear and shows a master eavesdropper at work.