The Wild Man from the East

A NEW LIFE (367 pp.)--Bernard Malamud--Farrar, Sfraus & Cudahy ($4.95).

To Seymour Levin, a bearded exile from Manhattan, the Pacific Northwest is the Promised Land. Standing beneath a night sky splashed with a million stars, breathing deeply of the forest air. Levin thinks, "Imagine getting all this for nothing!" He tramps for miles through the countryside, exchanging stares with cud-chewing cattle. He had never before seen a Hereford or a Black Angus and "they had never seen a Levin."

Last Year's Train. Everyone is kind. Hearty Dr. Gerald Gilley and his wife Pauline, who looks "like a lily on a long stalk," welcome Levin to Cascadia State College--the only one of 52 U.S. colleges that responded favorably to his application for a teaching job. An ex-drunkard and a repeated failure. Levin is humbly grateful. At 30, he sees himself as a "man still running after last year's train, far behind in the world."

Cascadia's students are handsome, bovine, and interested only in a passing grade. In his determination to give Cascadia his very best, Levin tries to light a divine fire in them, to teach them "what's for sale in a commercial society, and what had better not be." He gets back only a blank, uncomprehending stare. To his fellow teachers, Levin seeks to communicate his passionate belief that the liberal arts should have an equal place in the curriculum alongside animal husbandry and road engineering. They back away as if fearing infection.

The girls of Cascadia respond more warmly to Levin's bearded charm. Teacher Avis Fliss entices him with "her well-stacked bosom and behind like a hard head of cabbage." So does a shapely coed. But love comes thunderously during a chance encounter in an enchanted wood with Pauline Gilley, the susceptible wife of his benefactor.

Nearly drowning in a sea of requited passion, Levin surfaces only to get into more trouble. He rifles the desks of his colleagues in his search for proof that academic freedom is being violated, he rashly campaigns to prevent the cuckolded Dr. Gilley from becoming department head and, in general, behaves like an abrasive cinder in the well-oiled mediocrity of Cascadia State.

Fed up, the bland and unassuming Northwesterners suddenly close ranks against the wild man from the East. His teaching career in ruins, saddled with Pauline Gilley and her two children, Levin departs--uncertain to the very end whether he is Pauline's savior or her victim.

Tender Qualities. In his previous novels (The Natural, The Assistant), Author Bernard Malamud, 47, wrote allegories that had the convincing bite of realism. Though there has never been a home run king like The Natural's Outfielder Roy Hobbs, his tragicomic baseball adventures seem as authentic as Mantle and Maris. Though The Assistant's lyrical delicatessen world cannot be found anywhere in Brooklyn, the painful journey toward redemption of ex-Thief Frank Alpine rings universally true. In contrast, A New Life is written primarily in realistic terms, and in those terms it often fails. Cascadia State is obviously a rendering of Oregon State, where Brooklyn-born Author Malamud spent twelve years as a professor of English, and he has remembered perhaps too well all the involuted details of campus gossip and college routine.

But Malamud remains as expert as before in his persuasive alternations of farce and sadness, the tender Chekhovian qualities that have marked all his work. His hero, Levin, is a born victim of circumstance: if he holds a baby on his lap, it wets him; if he holds a class spellbound, it is only because his fly is open. He is a man with a rage for justice, and an inner compulsion to keep "on paying for being alive." But in all his straining leaps toward the highest goals, he is scarcely capable of getting his two left feet off the ground. Levin ends, as did Frank Alpine in The Assistant, chained to an onerous, self-imposed duty that will either redeem or destroy him.

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