The strengths and shortcomings of Malamud's A New Life

Still enjoying Bernard Malamud's A New Life, about half-way through, in the Library of America Novels and Stories from the 1960s edition - it's by no means a great novel, but it's very good, great in places, and surprisingly un-dated (things don't change all that much in academics, even after 50 years); we follow the main character, Sy Levin, through his first year teaching English (composition, actually) in a small NW college. Variously, the plot has him as a pawn between two faculty members competing for the soon to be vacant chairmanship, involved, unsurprisingly, with an adoring but most likely unstable student, and entangled in a conflict regarding apparently plagiarized compositions. Only gradually does he realize how dangerous some of the so-called colleagues can be, as they put the squeeze on him, and how stupid he was to get involved with a student and then refuse to give her a break on her grades when she comes to him tearfully in his office. A great highlight in the novel is the section on Levin's acquiring an old car, his attempts to learn to drive (a life-long New Yorker, he had never driven before), and his excursion out to the coast for his rendez-vous with the student: Levin is a Woody Allen-type protagonist, a hapless intellectual totally lost in nature, among mechanical objects, among the goyim. The drive out to the coast is hilariously comic - the overheated engine, stuck in the mud and pulled out by a farmer who then asks Levin to use a pliers and pull a rotten tooth!, terrified of logging trucks, driving way too slow, lost in the fog - and some passages of great natural beauty, as well. What keeps the novel from being great, and why it's probably one of Malamud's lesser-known works, is that there is no back story whatsoever - Levin has come West in search of "a new life," but we know nothing about the life he has left behind or about what exactly prompted his exile; compare this with Roth's When She Was Good, a similar novel from the late '60s, about 8 years later I think, and we can see the richness and complexity of the protagonist's life - his complex relationship with his father and family - even as we see him struggle to make a "new life" on a Midwest campus.