Dubin’s Lives was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1979 and is widely considered Malamud’s most personal novel — a portrait of a writer in late middle age confronting mortality, desire, and the question of whether a life devoted to art has been worth living. William Dubin, a biographer working on a life of D.H. Lawrence, finds Lawrence’s gospel of sexual freedom and vital energy dissolving the careful boundaries of his own respectable existence.
The Novel
Dubin lives in a small New England town with his wife Kitty — a marriage of mutual respect that has calcified into routine. His previous biographies (of Thoreau, of Mark Twain) were successful; the Lawrence is proving intractable, perhaps because Lawrence’s philosophy challenges everything Dubin’s ordered life represents.
Into this equilibrium walks Fanny Bick — a young woman, sexually free, intellectually curious, everything that Dubin’s life is not. Their affair — halting, passionate, guilty, resumed and broken off multiple times — becomes the novel’s central action. But it is not a simple adultery narrative: Malamud is interested in the relationship between Dubin’s biographical practice (entering other lives through imagination) and his own inability to live fully in his own life.
The biographer’s problem is also the novelist’s problem: how do you write about life without living it? How do you understand passion if your own existence is temperate? Dubin’s immersion in Lawrence’s fiery gospel is both research and seduction — he is being changed by his subject, corrupted or liberated depending on perspective.
Themes
Biography and identity — Dubin has spent his life entering other people’s consciousnesses. Has this made him more human or less? More understanding or more detached? The novel asks whether the examined life is worth living if the examination replaces the living.
Aging — Dubin is fifty-seven, aware that time is limited, that choices are closing off. His affair with Fanny is partly about desire and partly about refusing death — the old man’s desperate grab at youth.
Nature — the Vermont landscape is rendered with Malamud’s characteristic attention to weather, seasons, and the physical world. Dubin walks obsessively — the walks structure the novel as they structure his thinking.
Collecting Dubin’s Lives
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1979): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint
- “First printing, 1979” stated
- 362 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $50–$150. A major Malamud novel from a major publisher — not scarce.
Signed copies: $200–$500.
The novel is increasingly valued as Malamud’s most achieved realistic novel — the book where his characteristic themes (moral struggle, the costs of devotion, the hunger for transformation) find their fullest expression in a contemporary American setting.