"Like an end is more than I can stand? Each book I write nudges me
that much closer to death?" Perhaps that is why Lesser, who has
been working on his third book for ten years, cannot complete it
although by the close of Malamud's novel, which begins quietly
enough and which deals with two of his unheroic hero-victims, one
black, one white, he has perhaps brought you closer to more than
you can stand. Lesser lives alone, in a fetid abandoned slum
tenement, shackled to the books he must write when Willie Spearmint
moves in. He's also a writer, a self-styled Soul Writer, and not a
very good one, but equally shackled to the printed word which may
release the experience he's lived: "All day I walk on myself and
the shit sticks to my shoes." In time they communicate even if they
can never really cross over into each other's world: "Be white. Be
Jewish?" "Be close is better" - this is an impossible objective
particularly when Lesser appropriates Willie's (white) girl, and
Willie disappears, destroying his own work, destroying Lesser's,
and. . . . In this book, Malamud relies more on fierce' extremes
than he has ever done before, but then he always gentles his
material with humor, with that redemptive conscience, and above all
with a compassion which extends all of his works beyond the mapped
margins of existence, however destitute. (Kirkus Reviews)
The last remaining tenant in a condemned New York tenement, Harry Lesser struggles against rising panic and escalating odds to complete the novel he started ten years earlier, while his landlord Levenspiel cajoles through closed doors with hard-luck tales and substantial cashsums. Then he stumbles on a black man, sitting typing in one of the deserted flats: Willie Spearmint, soul writer. Touchy, hostile and anti-semitic - demanding then denouncing Lesser's critical help with his floridly voilent tales of oppression and pogroms against whites - Spearmint is exactly what he doesn't need - or does he? For each man has his motives.....First published in 1971, THE TENANTS is a pessimistic, ruthlessly funny dissection of a writing and racial relationship of profound unease and -ultimately - mutual creative destruction.
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