Looking back on Malamud: Why his reputation lags behind his contemporaries

I'm willing to admit that there's something I don't yet see in Bernard Malamud's stories - I've liked several, particularly Last Mohican, on which I posted recently - but in general have found them to be like second-order Singer or Gogol stories, mixing the sacred and profane but not in ways that really astonish or move me - but at least 3 friends whom I know to be excellent and discriminating readers speak very highly of his stories, so I will definitely read more. That said, my response to a FB post by PT has led to some discussion as to Malamud's place in the literary pantheon. I'm not totally partial to discussions about who's great, who's greater, and so forth, but I think it's fair to say that Malamud, though his reputation may be rising, is not generally considered on the same level of stature as his near contemporaries among Jewish-American writers, Bellow and Roth. Why is that? I'll posit a few reasons: in Malamud's work, for better or worse, there is no single place, location, or setting that he has claimed and defined as his own, like Roth's Newark (Weequaic) or Bellow's Chicago (we could add Cheever's Wapshot and Updike's Brewer to the mix, too). Similarly, Malamud did not create single defining character that would serve as his alter ago across a span of novels, nor a single character who seems to live beyond the page: no Zuckerman, no Portnoy, to Rabbit Angstrom, no Augie March. In fact, he goes out of his way to make his characters into abstracts, into types: throughout The Fixer, he frequently refer to the protagonist as "the fixer"; similarly, in A New Life, the protag is often just "the instructor." I also think the span of his imagination - writing variously about baseball, about a small-town college, about a Tsarist-era Jew, etc. - makes it harder for us to consolidate his work in our reflections and imaginations - each Malamud work stands on its own, you might say, whereas each Roth novel seems to add to our cumulative knowledge of Roth's consciousness, ditto for Updike and Bellow. Malamud is far more overtly philosophical than Roth, Updike, Cheever - but less so than Bellow, to Malamud's disadvantage: Bellow's strong attachment to academic life, which actually did lead to some good fiction (same for Roth, by the way), gives his work a gravitas  (or at least the appearance of gravitas) that has bedazzled critics and prize committees; as Malamud apparently wryly noted in a diary entry: Bellow wins Nobel Prize, Malamud wins $24.45 at poker. I'm not saying here than any of these great writers embarked on careerism or let thoughts of fame guide them in selection and development of material and of their art, but I think looking back we can see how Malamud's uncertainty regarding subject and setting, products of the extreme difficulty of his life that few other writers have face at all let alone so courageously, have made it difficult to judge, much less to enshrine, Malamud's life's work.