Harry Lesser just wants to finish his book. He’s been working on it for ten years, and it’s stripped him of a social life. He scarcely ventures beyond his flat in New York, so the outside world exists only in his mind and on the pages he writes. He is frequently pestered by his landlord, Levenspiel, who pleads with him to pack up and leave, for plans to demolish the building have been in place for nearly a year, and the writer is its only remaining resident. Lesser stubbornly refuses, not wishing to part from the place where he first started his book. It is his third novel; the first was a success but the second flopped, and he hopes that his latest effort will be his crowning achievement.
One day Lesser discovers another man living in the tenement: a moody, thickset African-American called Willie Spearmint. He is also a writer and sees the derelict apartment block as the ideal spot for working on his own book. When he asks Lesser to read his manuscript and give feedback, writer to writer, his feelings are hurt, and tensions between them only increase when Harry falls for Willie’s girlfriend, Irene. The two men hold different views on what constitutes good writing; while Lesser is an advocate for form and technique, Willie, as a soul writer, is only interested in authentically portraying black experience rather than adhering to conventional methods. This is the plot of Malamud’s 1971 novel, The Tenants.
Much like in The Assistant (1957), Malamud depicts a fraught relationship between a Jew and a Gentile. That Willie is a black man adds a different but nonetheless fascinating dimension to this relationship, as he embodies a ferocious resistance to racial discrimination in the immediate post-civil rights movement period in the United States. Willie isn’t a very likeable person, however. He is bad-tempered, anti-Semitic, and uses Irene as a sexual toy to play with whenever he needs a break from writing. Lesser isn’t innocent in his treatment of her either, and just like Willie he values writing above anything else. Moreover, he too is guilty of racism, although his is less overt as the friction increases.
When reading The Tenants, one cannot shrug off the constant feeling that danger is closing in on Malamud’s protagonist, lurking in the eerily quiet corridors or the dimly-lit stairwell. An impressive aspect of this hugely entertaining novel is that like Harry, we quickly forget that a world exists beyond the confines of his sorry apartment building. San Francisco is a place that is mentioned various times as a potential gateway to a life of contentment for when he finishes his book, but we never truly believe that he will end up there.
In writing The Tenants, a book about ‘love’, Lesser hopes to somehow conjure up the answer to this eternal mystery so that he can experience it in its purest form. His desire is to essentially unearth a truer sense of what it means to be human through the art of literature, yet he is perpetually trapped in the insular space of the tenement as well as his own imagination. Herein lies the ultimate paradox: the deeper he delves into the endless and rich possibilities of his creative mind, the emptier and more neglected his surroundings become, and the more estranged he is from the kind of world he invents and wishes to be a part of.
Words by Callum McGee
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