Books: The Good Grocer

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Brooklyn-born Bernard Malamud, 43, assistant professor of English at Oregon State College, is now in Rome on a fellowship working on his third novel. He writes out of his own experience (his father was a New York grocer). In The Assistant, Malamud brings to his story of the poor not only pity without sentimentality and realism without bad taste; he gives their humblest acts a kind of foreboding excitement that can only spring from a conviction that they—the poor and the meek—will inherit the earth.