God's Grace

Name: God's Grace
ISBN: 9780374529673

A Novel

Bernard Malamud

God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood—a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction.

The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son—a "marginal error"—finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world.

With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books.

"Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations." —Cynthia Ozick

About the Author

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) was an American novelist and short story writer celebrated for his richly moral fiction and his exploration of Jewish American life. Born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents who ran a small grocery store, Malamud drew on that working-class, immigrant milieu throughout his career, even when his stories ventured into other settings and subjects.

He first gained wide acclaim with The Natural (1952), a mythic baseball novel later adapted into the popular 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His reputation was cemented with The Assistant (1957) and the story collection The Magic Barrel (1958), which won the National Book Award. In 1967, his novel The Fixer, based on the real-life case of a Jewish man falsely accused of ritual murder in czarist Russia, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a second National Book Award.

Alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud is often regarded as one of the great voices of 20th-century Jewish American literature, known for blending realism with fable-like, allegorical touches and a deep concern with suffering, guilt, and redemption. He taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont and continued writing until his death in 1986.