From schlemiel to schmuck - Levin's evolution in Malamud's A New Life

At the end of Bernard Malamud's A New Life (spoilers here - thought I'm guessing if you're reading this you've already read the novel?) the protagonist, who has evolved from a hapless fledgling academic into a self-confident man of the (small) world, gets the girl - Sy Levin and Pauline head off for Nevada where she will get her divorce and they will live ... ever after. Though perhaps not happily - the final very odd chapter is mostly made up of a long diatribe in which Pauline's husband and Sy's colleague, Gerald Gilley, tells him everything that's wrong about Pauline and everything that can go wrong once they're married. Obviously he has his own motives - sorrow at her loss, humiliation and jealousy regarding Levin - but it's also clear that he's not making this up out of thin air, so to speak. Pauline may turn out to be no prize - she and Levin attracted to each other in part because of their social and temperamental differences, also because of the thrill of breaking the rules, of the illicit affair. How long will that last? Gerald is right - not long, most likely. So it's a novel with a "happy" ending that feels also like a beginning - of a completely different sort of novel. There's no telling how much of Malamud's personal experience went into this novel - obviously, the protagonist hues closely to many elements of Malamud's personal life story. But the willful break-up of a marriage is not pleasant, collegial, even moral behavior - and I don't sense that Malamud is completely in line with what Levin has done to his colleague, a foolish and narrow-minded man but also a man who meant to do no harm. Levin starts as a shlemiel and ends up, despite his romantic triumph, as something of a schmuck. This feels in a way like a novel that Malamud had to write - to get this era of his existence, his sojourn in the remote Northwest, out of his soul and into his art; as noted in previous posts, this novel has some wonderful moments, particularly some of the comic elements more toward the first half of the novel; as the tone becomes more serious and stakes higher, the novel feels less assured and less original - another suburban drama of domestic turmoil and marital woe. The academic politics scenes are excellent, however, and as true today as in 1960, from all that I know and have learned.