Books: Lonely Cosmos

DUBIN'S LIVES by Bernard Malamud Farrar, Straus & Giroux 362 pages; $10

Author Bernard Malamud, 64, is a messenger who brings the bad news. His vision is firm and tragic, and a strain of Old Testament severity runs through his novels and short stories: all of his characters either know instinctively or must be taught that life is real, earnest and achingly impermanent. As a consequence, Malamud's career has earned him awards and formidable respect but produced little dancing in the streets. He is an author easy to admire and hard to love.

Dubin's Lives, Malamud's seventh novel and first book in nearly six years, follows the uncompromising trail of his previous fiction and makes the journey memorable once again. William Dubin is a successful biographer in his mid-50s. Isolated by choice on nine acres of land in upstate New York, Dubin begins a new book, mindful of the vicarious nature of his craft: "One writes lives he can't live." The subject in this case is D.H. Lawrence, whose yawps about sex and blood consciousness seem designed to unhinge middle-aged intellectuals. Dubin proves no exception and soon takes up with Fanny Bick, nearly 35 years his junior.

What follows is much more than simply another anatomy of a January-June mismatch. In Malamud's world, acts have consequences, mindless pleasures lead to reflective pain. Things start badly. Dubin takes Fanny on a quick trip to Yenice, hoping to feed on her vitality and youth, and gets the callow treatment he deserves. Stung, he returns home and holes up for a long, bitter winter of dis content: "He fought winter as if it were the true enemy: if he tore into it the freeze would vanish, his ills be gone, his life, his work, fall into place." Nothing helps. Lawrence eludes the biographer, and the book grinds to a stop. Dubin's wife Kitty is jittery about becoming older; she misses the son and daughter who have grown up and left. So does Dubin, sinking ever deeper into depression: "I am in my thoughts a detached lonely man, my na ture subdued by how I've lived and the lives I've written."

Dubin's descent is painful to watch but thoroughly absorbing, for his struggle assumes heroic dimensions. He is smart enough to bear the responsibility for his anguish and strong enough to fight it.

"Subjectivity sickens me," he tells him self. "I fear myself fearing." Unexpectedly, Fanny reappears, offering what looks like genuine love. Dubin accepts, but with fewer illusions. His problem will remain because it is his inescapable condition: he is a man facing 60 who can take from life more easily than he can give.

Too few novels offer a character who grows convincingly from page to page. Dubin's Lives presents not only the hero but the women around him. Kitty, Fanny, Dubin's daughter Maud all pull away from their orbits around Dubin and strike out in directions he cannot predict. Without uttering a single polemic, Malamud builds one of the sharpest images of women's liberation in contemporary fiction.