The Assistant (novel)
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First edition cover
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| Author | Bernard Malamud |
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| Cover artist | Moshe Goygadosh |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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Publication date
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1957 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 246 |
| ISBN | (paperback, latest edition, 2003) |
| OCLC | 734832 |
| 813/.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3563.A4 A8 2003 |
| Preceded by | The Natural (1952) |
| Followed by | The Magic Barrel (1958) |
The Assistant (1957) is Bernard Malamud's second novel. Set in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, it explores the situation of first- and second-generation Americans in the early 1950s as experienced by three main characters and the relationships between them: an aging Jewish refugee from Tsarist Russia who owns and operates a failing small grocery store, a young Italian American drifter trying to overcome a bad start in life by becoming the grocer's assistant and the grocer's daughter, who becomes romantically involved with her father's assistant despite parental objections and misgivings of her own.
It was adapted into a movie in 1997.
Morris Bober, the 60-year-old proprietor of an old-fashioned grocery store, faces destitution as his customers abandon him in favor of more modernized shops. The situation is aggravated late one night when he's held up at gunpoint in his deserted store by a pair of masked thugs. The gunman beats him, leaving Bober with a debilitating head injury. Just at this time, Frank Alpine makes his appearance: a 25-year-old vagrant from the West Coast, raised in an orphanage after his father abandoned him. Leaving an abusive foster home to live as a drifter, he makes his way East in hopes of finding opportunities to turn his life around. (Later he berates himself for having had many opportunities but inevitably doing something to botch them.)
Frank begins to haunt Morris' store and offers to work without pay as his assistant, claiming that this will give him experience he can use in a future job search. The grocer, weakened by the assault and trying to recuperate without benefit of medical care, accepts and arranges for him to have room and board with the upstairs tenants, a young Italian-American couple, and provides him some pocket money. Only at this point is it revealed to the reader that Frank was the accomplice to the gunman in the holdup.
Frank works industriously to improve the store's upkeep, and his attentive service wins customers. The resulting increased income is being supplemented by Frank's surreptitiously returning, in discreet amounts, his share of the holdup take. Simultaneously, however, he begins pilfering from the till. He justifies this to himself by claiming it as recompense for his contribution to the store's improved situation, and keeps an account of his petty theft with the intention of eventually returning it all. Morris and his wife Ida, the latter particularly uncomfortable with the gentile's presence, attribute the improvement to the customers' "preferring one of their own," and Morris insists on offering Frank more money. During lulls in the work day the men's conversations touch upon philosophical and personal matters, and Frank privately struggles with his own ethical quandary.
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