Nothing Happened

DUBIN'S LIVES by Bernard Malamud is another example of the male menopause novel, a form that has become increasingly popular in recent years with such authors as Saul Bellow, John Updike and John Fowles. Men in their mid-life crisis get bored with their careers, fall out of love with their wives and in love with younger women, suddenly and unexpectedly find that they have lost control of their lives.

William Dubin is such a man. A biographer, he has taken on a study of D.H. Lawrence and is having great difficulty fathoming the man. Lawrence's character is alien to Dubin, and the task becomes an uncomfortable wrestling match, paralleling Dubin's own struggles with his sexuality, his darker side.

Dubin falls in love with Fanny Bick, a semi-flower child and college dropout. He is fifty-seven; she is twenty-two. It takes him 200 pages to get around to making love to her. They love each other, passionately, but Dubin cannot let go of his wife, of his ordered life. Malamud's descriptions of a middle-aged marriage-gone-sour are minutely detailed, embarassing in their intimacy and immediacy.

The novel is full of descriptive passages of up-state winters, seasonal changes which echo emotional changes in Dubin. Long desolate winters filled with blizzards and despair are followed by short ecstatic springs filled with hope, and reunions with Fanny.

Other dichotomies haunt Dubin's life. He is Jewish; his wife is a WASP. He is a city boy transplanted to the country, middle-aged and in love with youth, an orderly soul fighting chaos. The novel is one long standoff between these competing forces, and in the end there is no resolution.

IT BEGINS HOPEFULLY, the bare, carefully-crafted prose interspersed with a Yiddish irony that lightens its mood. Dubin's wife Kitty has a compulsion to smell the gas burners on the stove to make sure they are not leaking. Once she leaves the house without performing the ritual: "Kitty hastily reentered the house, hurried into the kitchen, fighting herself. Herself won."

But these light touches disappear too soon, and somewhere in the second half of the book we begin, guiltily, to skip whole paragraphs of that beautiful prose, wanting something, anything to happen.

But the book is more about things not happening. Connections are not made, decisions are not reached. Dubin, on his walks, sees his dearest friend on the road, cannot face him, hides behind a tree and lets him pass. He yearns to confide in his estranged daughter. When she finally tells him of her affair with a man even older than her father, offering Dubin a perfect opening to finally unburden himself about his love for Fanny Bick, he lets the opportunity pass. Instead he delivers a tired, paternal lecture, retreating into the mythical wisdom he supposedly possesses as a biographer intimate with the lives of the great. Even when his wife discovers his affair with Fanny and the lame excuse of "protecting" her is gone, he still hasn't the nerve to give up his comfortable prison.

Dubin is ultimately a coward--one more sympathetic to his plight (and nearer his age) might call him very human?--but in the end the book is wearing. He obviously sees himself as likable (as does Malamud), but it becomes harder and harder to understand why. The problem is that the book becomes too much like Dubin--one of those people who draw you into their lives with the message, "I can change, I want to change, all I need is for you to believe in me, love me and I will change." And it ends with Dubin sneaking out the back door to Fanny and, never spending the night, sneaking back to his broken wife before dawn. Do we care?