The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

One of my best friends from high school and I always like to reminisce about our AP Literature class and how much of a joke it was. It was our teacher’s first and last year in a public school, and she assigned too many books, which I suppose wasn’t really a problem—we didn’t read most of them.

Ironically enough, the only one that I—one of just two black males in the class—ended up reading was Jewish author Bernard Malamud’s 1957 novel “The Assistant,” while my very Jewish friend read “Invisible Man” by black author Ralph Ellison. My pal claimed that Malamud’s novel was too boring and depressing.

This summer, as I languished away in the Cambridge sun, something—a longing for the familiar, perhaps—told me to revisit Malamud and his tale of an old Jewish grocery store owner whose newfound, gentile assistant tries to help the Bober family while fighting his own, prominent internal demons.

I instantly recalled why I enjoyed the novel so much the first time. On its surface, sure, it’s boring and depressing: Poverty, shattered dreams and the mundane happenings inside a floundering neighborhood grocery aren’t exactly a recipe for excitement.

But while it’s not easy to get the cynic in me to genuinely relate to the characters—a college dropout, a roaming thief, and an old, cantankerous couple—Malamud does it, through a combination of honest internal dialogue and a continuously building sympathy for those with good intentions who inevitably fall on bad luck.

When I stopped back home, I thought, for old time’s sake, I’d give “Invisible Man”—which I borrowed from the aforementioned friend, no less—another try. I got about two chapters in before realizing that, no matter how much I tried, it just wasn’t for me. Maybe it was too contrived, or maybe it lacked a certain diversity of thought present in “The Assistant.”

Whatever it was, though, I realized that, like the fortunes of Morris Bober, some things never change.