ABSTRACT
Philip Roth has had some cheeky things to say about Bernard Malamud—though Malamud would reply that they were Roth's problem, not his. For Roth divides twentieth-century American Jewish writers into two camps—the puritans and the cavaliers, the palefaces and the redskins, or the would-be religious moralists and the aggressively emotional, wilder eroticists. This is useful to me because in this section I want to consider rival objections against Malamud's attempt to win back the old, serious, unified life. And I want to raise those objections in what seems to me to be their most tempting form, especially to puritans: that is to say, sexually.
