Dubin's Lives

Meet William Dubin, the 56-year-old protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s wonderfully bitter-comic new novel, "Dubin’s Lives." Meet William Dubin, if he can spare you a moment from his disciplines. For Dubin works. He works at the craft of biography. He lives in upstate New York with his wife Kitty and studies men’s lives to see what he may learn from them and experience through them. "Everybody’s life is mine unlived," he has noted impulsively to himself. "One writes lives he can’t live. To live forever is a human hunger." Dubin works to lift himself out of "the self’s separate closed self-conscious subjectivity." He has written "Short Lives," a collection of sketches of people who died young, to learn "how intensely and creatively life can be lived even when it is early aborted." He has written "H. D. Thoreau" to learn to see nature.