Genesis II

By Patricia Blake

GOD'S GRACE by Bernard Malamud Farrar, Straus & Giroux 223 pages $13.50

For more than 20 years, Bernard Malamud has been talking like a novelist engage. Much of his fiction has explored Jewish "ethicality," which he defines as "how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living." In 1958, the year he published his National Book Award-winning stories, The Magic Barrel, he said, quoting Albert Camus: "The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." He has deplored the self-devaluation of modern man that springs from his having invented the means of his own extinction. It is no surprise, then, that his eighth novel deals with the nuclear apocalypse, the central humanist preoccupation of the 1980s.

What Malamud has actually produced is an astonishment: a fable of the last man so bizarre that it defies explication. At first it seems that in the person of Calvin Cohn, the author has in mind a latter-day Noah. Adrift in a boat Cohn is the only human survivor of the "Second Flood" that follows a nuclear war between the "Djanks" and "Druzhkies." Speaking from a crack in the sky, God addresses Cohn: "That you went on living, Mr. Cohn, I regret to say, was no more than a marginal error. . . Therefore live quickly--a few deep breaths and go your way. Beyond that lies nothing for you."

Cohn is no Noah. Indeed, readers would do well to give up any notion of decoding the ciphers and symbols that fall as thick and fast as the hailstones of God's wrath. What is one to make, for example, of Cohn's companion on his frail ark: a talking chimpanzee named Buz, after "one of the descendants of Nahor, the brother of Abraham the Patriarch." Granted that Cohn, a former rabbinical student, is given to excesses in biblical name giving, his choice of Buz is scarcely apposite; the chimp is a Christian convert who crosses himself when Cohn reads to him from the Book of Genesis.

The plot is equally enigmatic. When the ark is beached on a tropical island, Cohn and Buz encounter other creatures: a gorilla, eight baboons and eight chimps! which are quickly given such names as Esau and Saul of Tarsus. On every day save the Sabbath, Cohn lectures the apes on the obligations of freedom, the American Constitution, the Big Bang, the nature of evil and other elevated subjects. On Passover he conducts a Seder for the sapient monkeys, except for the intractable gorilla, who will attend only to the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Somewhere in this jungle fantasy is no doubt concealed an allegory of the Jews' well-known didacticism and their penchant for social justice. More obscure is the significance of Cohn's coupling with Mary Madelyn (the chimp pronunciation of Mary Magdalene), the island's unique female, a chimp who quotes from Romeo and Juliet with a lisp ("What wov can do, that dares wov attempt"). The fact that only Cohn and Mary Madelyn have sex, producing a baby, causes the beasts to go amuck. In a lunatic re-enactment of both Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac and of the Crucifixion, Cohn is killed by the apes. In a final tableau, the gorilla dons a yarmulke and "in his throaty, gruff voice" recites the Kaddish.

A gorilla mouthing the prayer for the dead over a human being? Malamud, who once called for fiction "filled with love, beauty and hope," has now written a novel filled with death, bestiality and despair. Why has he called it God's Grace?Even in fiction, his grace must mean more than man's disgrace. --By Patricia Blake

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