This book, this book. I’m not even sure where to start or how to do it justice.

Most people recognize Bernard Malamud only if you say, “He wrote The Natural.” I’ve never read the book but I do love the movie (one of the last truly great Redfords, back-to-back with Out of Africa), and I can comfortably say the book stands apart from most of Malamud’s other work. He’s considered one of the giant greats of American Jewish literature of the 20th century and deserves the accolade, but I really dislike the way writers who express religious or ethnic ties are put into genre boxes the same way science fiction or romance writers are — Jewish literature, African-American literature.

But are there stylistic ties between our identities and our writing? In The Tenants, Malamud feels out the relationship between Jewishness and writing, blackness and writing. Harry Lesser is a thirtysomething Jewish writer with a successful first novel; he has spent nine years since shaping his second novel and living off the money from the first. He is the last tenant in a lower Manhattan apartment house scheduled for demolition but feels he must remain there until he finishes the book. He realizes there’s a squatter — Bill Spear, Willie Shakespear in print, a black writer from Harlem who’s furiously chipping away at his own novel.

Spear makes fun of Lesser for being an inexperienced square, for living and dying by form instead of feeling. But he is wounded when Lesser reads his draft and tells him it’s sloppily written. Spear and Lesser spend the rest of the novel developing more and more extreme feelings toward each other, and the feelings are wrapped up in each’s personal identity as a black man, as a Jewish man, with some unquestioned stereotypes about the other.

Lesser is a mess. He’s writing a novel about a novelist who’s writing a novel, and his subject is also thirtysomething, single, struggling with the same book for a long time. When Lesser explains the plot, he says the writer in the book is trying to define love for himself by writing it so that he may live it. Lesser is doing the same thing.

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