Why Malamud's on the margins

The title story in Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel" is quite good and oft-anthologized, though that's not the only reason I am sure I was not alone in foreseeing the "surprise" ending - Malamud has a weakness for these little twists at the end of his stories which leads me to think readers (and editors) in his day were easy marks, expecting every story to be straightforward and easily not off their pins by a little surprise twist (my gosh, the matchmaker's trying to set up the client/rabbi with his own daughter, who'd have thought?) or readers have become far more sophisticated thanks in part to writers like Malamud, who skirted the boundaries between realism and fantasy. He's not quite as fantastical as I.B. Singer, with his golems and djybuks, but Malamud, looking back on him from a 50-year vantage, was far more Old World than his contemporary kinsman, Roth and Bellow: Malamud's characters don't feel like Americans in the 1950s, they're like the 1650s! Compare with Roth and Bellow who write about young Jewish Americans struggling to make it in contemporary society, struggling with their families who may have Old World values, accents, traditions, but are in the game, insurance, sales, baseball - think of Bellow's famous opening line in Augie March: I am American, Chicago born. That declares the world in which they worked; Malamud seems ancient in comparison. I don't say this necessarily as a critique, a writer can choose (and create) his or her own world or milieu, but it does explain I think why Malamud has slipped to the margins and Roth and Bellow are still and I think always will be at the center of any discussion of 20th-century writing in America.