Bernard Malamud: A Descriptive Bibliography by Rita N. Kosofsky, and: Conversations with Bernard Malamud by Lawrence Lasher (review)

Studies in American Fiction121 to basic ideas in linguistics and ways in which these concepts may be used in the analysis of literary texts, a process of close reading that she demonstrates quite effectively in her final chapter on Faulkner's "That Evening Sun." Here her interesting work with fragmented and gender-related aspects of children's speech in the figures of Caddy and Quentin reveals Faulkner's subtle reversal of masculine and feminine characteristics in these two children that leads not to a happy, compensatory balancing of these qualities in either child but rather to dissonance, to incompletion. At the beginning of her study, Hurst raises a number of important questions concerning how the ways in which children are represented in our fiction reflect our general cultural attitude toward children. Yet in the course of her inquiries she never develops a sustained argument over what she perceives as a general cultural neglect of the child; save for a brief allusion to Leslie Fiedler's "The Eye of Innocence," on the child in American literature, Hurst does not return to one of the most salient and provocative essays on the subject of the child in American literature. The book also left this reader asking other questions. Why, for example, does Hurst begin in the nineteenth century, rather than with the first soundings of the child's voice in American literature, in the "joyous death" books of Janeway and Mather? And why does Hurst exclude children's literature from the scope of her discussion when the fictional child's voice speaks with such frequency and persistent poetry in those pages? She only includes a few instances of children's literature (such as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) that have "become an enduring part of our larger literary and cultural heritage" (p. 7). But such an exclusionary clause, which disregards the child voices in such classics as The Wizard of Oz, The Cat in the Hat, Charlotte's Web, and Where the Wild Things Are, unwittingly plays into the very politics of critical silence concerning the child's voice that Hurst wishes to correct. One certainly wishes that she had given ear to those even more marginal voices and the broad cultural context in which they speak in this otherwise promising, interesting study. University of FloridaJohn Cech Kosofsky, Rita N. Bernard Malamud: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991. 296 pp. Cloth: $47.50. Lasher, Lawrence. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. The Univ. of Mississippi Press, 1991. 180 pp. Cloth: $29.95. Paper: $14.95. While no new breakthroughs in Malamud criticism or major reassessments of his work have occurred since the author's passing in 1986, two noteworthy books dealing with Malamud should at least conjoin to widen the scope and depth of Malamud studies. Rita N. Kosofsky, the earliest laborer in the vineyard of Malamud bibliography, and author of Bernard Malamud: An Annotated Checklist (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1969), has now published a sequel to her first bibliographical study, Bernard Malamud: A Descriptive Bibliography. Inevitably, bibliographical scholarship is both a Sisyphean effort and a collective enterprise, and thus Kosofsky's latest book adds to Richard O'Keefe's recent bibliographical essay, "Bernard Malamud" (SAJL, 7 [1988], 240—50), which briefly comments on Malamud citations from 1984—1987. The heart 122Reviews oí Kosofsky's book, her descriptive bibliographical citations, is organized into three major sections: "Critical Essays," "Reviews," and "Dissertations." Covering material on Malamud published from 1952 through 1990, it traverses much of the same ground as Joel Salzberg's Bernard Malamud: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), but Kosofsky does include several items in her book not cited in Salzberg's study. In addition to the thoughtful survey of the critical writing on Malamud's work in her introduction, Kosofsky furnishes other forms of valuable bibliographical assistance to students of Malamud. As a result of her acquaintance with Ann Malamud, the author's wife, Kosofsky was given access to Malamud's personal library and thereby corrected and added to information in the section, "Bernard Malamud: A Chronology." Kosofsky not only includes the dates of Malamud's novels and story collections published in America and England but also gives...