Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin (1968), Paperback, 316 pages
Description
Sy Levin, a 30-year-old high school teacher beset by alcohol and bad decisions, leaves New York for the Pacific Northwest to start over as a college professor, imagining that an extraordinary new life awaits him there. Soon after arriving, he realizes that he had fallen for the myth of the West as a place of personal reinvention.
User reviews
LibraryThing member icolford
In A New Life, Bernard Malamud's third novel, Seymour Levin travels west to Cascadia College, leaving behind his native New York, a difficult childhood, and a youth squandered in an alcoholic fog. It is 1950 and he has turned his life around and hopes that at Cascadia he will be able to make a
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fresh start and build a career in academia. Cascadia is situated in an idyllic rural setting and Levin, thirty years old, appoaches his duties as composition instructor with idealistic fervor. He wants desperately to make a difference and convey his enthusiasm to his students, and along the way hopes to make friends and find love. But his colleagues in the English Department are settled in their ways, bound by tradition, and still recovering from a scandal that rocked the college a couple of years earlier. People are cordial but tentative, and his overtures of friendship are, while not exactly rebuffed, greeted with skepticism. As his first year at Cascadia progresses, Levin becomes increasingly frustrated with departmental policies and the more or less general resistance to his ideas for change, and later on discovers that he is perceived as a disruptive force and somewhat of a radical. At a certain point he finds himself seeking allies rather than friends, and when the position of Chair comes up for election, he decides to run. His quest for love also does not turn out quite as he had hoped when he becomes involved with the wife of a colleague and is finally compelled to make decisions that will have a long-term impact on his own life and the lives of others. A New Life is certainly entertaining and absorbing, filled with Malamud's customary narrative exuberance, absurdist flourishes, and unbridled physical comedy. But the novel's message is ambiguous. Levin's naivety is his downfall, and at the end we are left wondering if he is being rewarded for his persistence, getting more than he bargained for, or maybe just what he deserves. Levin often agonizes at length over whatever moral conundrum he's facing at the moment, and this can get tiresome, to the point where the impatient reader might wish he would get on with it already. The final impression is of a narrative that is somewhat diffuse and overlong. A New Life, while perhaps not Malamud's best work, is still a major novel by one of America's most accomplished and original writers and a worthy addition to the sub-genre of novels depicting academic life. Show Less
LibraryThing member TimBazzett
A NEW LIFE has been around for over fifty years now. I first read it more than forty years ago. But it remains a favorite Malamud novel for me. I've worn out a few different mass market paperback versions in the dozen or more times I've read it (and taught it too, back in my teaching days).
Although the story of S. Levin, "reformed drunkard," and his married lover, Pauline Gilley, is set firmly in 1950, it still seemed relevant when I read it again this week (July 2012). It remains a classic novel of academia at its worst. A director of composition who cuts pictures out of magazines, hoping to publish a picture book of literature. A dean who was once a successful used car salesman. The frustrated 'old maid' instructor. The office/departmental politics, the genteel poverty, and the sexual intrigue and pecadilloes - it's all still going on in the small third-rate colleges around the country. The McCarthy-ism has been replaced by the ill-conceived "patriot act" of post-9/11 and the nasty partisan garbage that has rendered our Congress nearly impotent.
But most of all it is Seymour Levin who carries Malamud's tale. More mensch than schlemiel or schlimazel, Levin comes across as a Sad Sack Eeyore sorta guy, but with big dreams of improving things, of building "a new life," as the title indicates. Shot through with allusions to Hardy and the rural life, Malamud has nailed the academia of the post-war years perfectly. Much of this is probably due to the author's own years spent teaching at a small college in Oregon back in the 1950s. For more background info on those years, a reader could benefit greatly from reading Janna Malamud Smith's memoir of her father, MY FATHER IS A BOOK, which I found simply delightful and infinitely informative.
Bottom line: there's a reason this book is still in print fifty years after its 1960 publication. It's just a damn good story. It'll make you laugh, because Levin does have a bit of both the schlemiel and the schlimazel in him, but it will be a wincing kind of laughter, because the humor is used for a particular effect - to show just how sad and complex life can often be. To show how sometimes even when you get what you thought you wanted, it will have changed in the getting. Good book!
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Although the story of S. Levin, "reformed drunkard," and his married lover, Pauline Gilley, is set firmly in 1950, it still seemed relevant when I read it again this week (July 2012). It remains a classic novel of academia at its worst. A director of composition who cuts pictures out of magazines, hoping to publish a picture book of literature. A dean who was once a successful used car salesman. The frustrated 'old maid' instructor. The office/departmental politics, the genteel poverty, and the sexual intrigue and pecadilloes - it's all still going on in the small third-rate colleges around the country. The McCarthy-ism has been replaced by the ill-conceived "patriot act" of post-9/11 and the nasty partisan garbage that has rendered our Congress nearly impotent.
But most of all it is Seymour Levin who carries Malamud's tale. More mensch than schlemiel or schlimazel, Levin comes across as a Sad Sack Eeyore sorta guy, but with big dreams of improving things, of building "a new life," as the title indicates. Shot through with allusions to Hardy and the rural life, Malamud has nailed the academia of the post-war years perfectly. Much of this is probably due to the author's own years spent teaching at a small college in Oregon back in the 1950s. For more background info on those years, a reader could benefit greatly from reading Janna Malamud Smith's memoir of her father, MY FATHER IS A BOOK, which I found simply delightful and infinitely informative.
Bottom line: there's a reason this book is still in print fifty years after its 1960 publication. It's just a damn good story. It'll make you laugh, because Levin does have a bit of both the schlemiel and the schlimazel in him, but it will be a wincing kind of laughter, because the humor is used for a particular effect - to show just how sad and complex life can often be. To show how sometimes even when you get what you thought you wanted, it will have changed in the getting. Good book!
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LibraryThing member Schmerguls
5495.. A New Life, by Bernard Malamud (read 23 Aug 2017) This is the 5th book by Malamud I have read. The first four i much enjoyed. This one was a disappointment, as the college instructor at an Oregon-like fictional college, having just gotten a job, proceeds to copulate with a student and then
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carry on a dreary adulterous affair, which after a time he ceases, temporarily. . I could not find anything interesting in the dreary introspection he indulges in as carries on his non-admirable personal life. Show Less
LibraryThing member drugfiend
One of my favourites, about a man rebuilding his life.
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 1962)
Notable Books List (1961)
Language
Original publication date
1961
ISBN
none