Academic novels and the stanger comes to the (university) town - Bernard Malamud's A New Life

The academic novel can be a pretty tiresome genre - there are far too many, because so many writers in the modern era have found their sustenance and patronage within the walls of academe, so, sadly, that's what they know and what they write and for whom they write - yet there are some good ones, and right now I'm enjoying Bernard Malamud's A New Life, the first entry in the Library of America edition of Malamud Novels and Stories from the 1960s. It's certainly a lesser-known of his works, and not a reputation-establishing work, either, but it was a bit of a stretch for him - his most notable writing is very NYC/East Coast based (perhaps The Natural is an exception, too?) and very Semitic. He's certainly close kin to Roth and Bellow, if never quite rising to their stature. But A New Life is just what its title promises: a young Jewish intellectual would-be scholar and teacher who heads off to take his sole job offer, at a pittance of salary, in a West Coast science-oriented college (obviously based on Oregon State, where Malamud taught for many years before he earned his props as a writer) - it's very much a story of culture clash, of fish out of water - and the alienation the main character, Sy Levin, feels helps propel the narration - we share his surprise at everything he sees, from the mountainous landscape, the sycamore leaves coating the ground like drop-cloths after a rainstorm, the (superficial?) friendliness, the lack of intellectual pretension, the outdoorsy orientation, and, unspoken, the completely "goyish" culture, in which he's so alien a presence that perhaps nobody even recognizes he's Jewish - just that he's a bearded New Yorker (live a visitor from Mars). There's a great deal of humor, as Levin tries to befriend various faculty members and as others corner him to line him up on their side in various internecine battles - not everything's as friendly as it seems on the surface - the politics are brutal and even corrupt - but the overall tone is never dark and cynical - Levin is a very sweet failure who may yet succeed (as Malamud did), and the other characters, he never holds himself above or apart from the other characters - he's open and engaging. It's so touching to watch him shyly ask a fellow faculty member if he'd like to catch a movie and a cup of coffee, or to see him good-naturedly accept an invitation to go fishing for chinook. I suspect nothing good will come of his adventures into the out of doors, and we can see some of the cold-heartedness behind those who approach him with invitations to "stop by any time" even if he can't see it right away. The novel is not strongly plot-driven, but it's very engaging and has a few hilarious moments, especially some of the dialog, which I may try to quote in a future post. Also worth noting that A New Life makes a neat comparison on many points with Roth's easterner-in-midwest-college ealry novel, When She Was Good (which was much darker and broader in scope, but also had the alien-visitor in academe qualities).