Customer Reviews

The Tenants of Moonbloom (New York Review Books Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wallant takes a fairly common premise--Norman Moonbloom works as an agent for his brother Irving's tenements, popping into and out of the tenants' lives to collect the rent--and makes it into an effective and moving vision of moral and social dislocation. There are elderly Holocaust survivors, stoned jazzbos, a young married couple, an od married couple, old cranks, a horny young Chinese-American guy, even a James Baldwin character, all of whom seem somehow marooned and desperate for Norman's attentions. Wallant presents each of them with grace and economy, sketching a vision of early-60s NYC that's somehow cheering despite the pervasive despair. By turns lyrical and earthy, this novel is wonderfully thought-provoking as an allegory (is Norman a Christ figure?) and equally enthralling as a minutely-noted tour through a vanished city.

Readers will not be able to comprehend that something so profoundly written has not been reckognized into mainstream literature. I've never seen so many beautiful, exact and vivid sentences compacted into one work. The story is humorous and emotional, while striking into the heart of universal themes and characterization. Wallant should be considered as great of a writer as Faulkner or Melville.

Before picking up this book to read for a book group discussion, I had only vaguely heard of Wallant. I now see what I had been missing. Had he lived, Wallant would have found a significant place in 20th-century American literature.

Having read the book, I am convinced that Wallant was an American original with a distinctive voice. Not much happens in The Tenants of Moonbloom. Most of the action is interior to the characters, who are living their days in quiet desperation. Wallant is able to show humanity as it is -- no retouching here -- without succumbing to cynicism. He cares deeply for all his characters, with all their flaws and errors.

At the center of the action is Norman Moonbloom, who finds a secular religion and acts upon it. He is one of the more unforgettable characters whom I have encountered.

There are novels that could be set anywhere at anytime , this is isn't one of them.Your'e in New York , somewhwere between 1958 and 1962.That is that. If you don't know New York and have some idea as to what it was like at that time , you may not particularly enjoy this book.It reminded me in various ways of a number of other books set in post WWII New York such as I.B. Singers New York fictions,L.J. Davis' A MEANINGFUL LIFE and even Patricia Highsmith's late novels DOGS RANSOM and FOUND IN THE STREET and Samuel Delaneys MOTION OF LIGHT ON WATER. Chances are if you like those books you'll like this and viceversa.New York exists here as a living, breathing character , the stongest character in the book.If you want a contrast consider Saul Bellows novels .New York turns up all the time but it's merely incidental to say,HERZOG.Even in SEIZE THE DAY or MR.SAMMLERS PLANET New York is really a backdrop.Not here.
The novel ends on a comic moving grace note that is funny and really quite a triumph.It gives you a sense of why you were reading this book in the first place.Wallant's early death was a tragedy.

NYRB Tenants of Moonbloom

I don't remember how I decided to buy a copy of The Tenants of Moonbloom--but it no longer matters. Perhaps because the main character Norman Moonbloom is a rent collector and agent for his brother Irwin's tenements, and two key characters are the superintendent and a plumber, I sensed that the Manhattan experience might shed some light on my parents' motel in Colorado. The back cover blurb of the novel says that, as Moonbloom collects the rent money, he hears the tenants' "cries of outrage and abuse[;] he learns about their secret sorrows and desires[.] And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn . . . into a desperate attempt to improve their lives." In my parent's motel, as in the narrative of Moonbloom, no one is ever anonymous when rent is collected in person or repairs and renovations are made while the tenant is on the premises. Things aren't done so personally anymore, and as a result, with this novel of 1963, we get a peek into the past. However, nothing in this novel is like anything I've ever read. In retrospect, this novel is so unique and unclassifiable that none of the jacket blurbs or commentary can tell the reader exactly what it's about; truly, one must read the novel.

Norman on himself: "Oh me," he said shrugging. "I'm New York's most educated rent collector. I'm trying to make what I'm stuck with into a vocation" (48).

The Tenants of Moonbloom raises many questions for readers interested in the craft of writing. To me, New York City, and Manhattan in particular, have always represented cultural diversity; when all other places seemed homogenous, one expected a crazy mix in NYC. Wallant's task was difficult: How does a writer craft episodes with ethnically, racially, or emotionally diverse people while avoiding stereotype? These kinds of diversity, in Tenants of Moonbloom, appear kooky or kinky and exotic to the reader not from New York, but the characters' misery and alienation makes the ending almost necessary. This might be the only novel--that I recall--that reconciles these wide differences and links the fate of the characters.

Until this novel, it had never occurred to me that renovating and cleaning rentals could be a spiritual experience. The Tenants of Moonbloom could be New York City's quintessential existentialist novel. Does it depict a kind of crazy, insanely inspired religious experience?

Edward Lewis Wallant's choice of words, his idiolect, his phrasing is at times so unusual that it took my attention away from the action and characters, but I would not have it any other way. Here are a few of Wallant"s images: "Turning, he [Beeler] motioned Norman to sit on a tortured ottoman" (39); "His stomach was used to food prepared for mass lack of taste" (42); "He began to laugh, caught himself, and shivered the mirth to a stop" (171).

Wallant's powers of observation: Norman with Bodien, the plumber, in the smelly, grimy basement, as they inspect and fix the water pipes: "Norman looked up with him at the dark ceiling of the cellar, as though he could see the metal veins carrying the flow through the body of the house, and pictured the sudden resumption of things in all the apartments" (76).

One of Wallant's gemstones: His rendition of writer James Baldwin as Paxton.

Wallant is specific about the location of the Moonbloom tenements. Maybe a reader in the NYC area can shed light on this: 70th Street, Mott Street, 2nd Avenue, and 13th Street.

I found this book amid my wanderings and grazings in the library and was deep in the story before I knew it. "How the heck did that happen," I wondered, looking at my finger marking the place past the middle of the book.
I was surprised that Wallant could make his ghostlike protagonist so easy to keep company with. Moonbloom has some interesting people to puzzle out and be touched by, in spite of his interior distance, and that's part of what makes this a compelling read, but it's Moonbloom himself, in his innocent emptiness, becoming stained by life, that gives this book its poetry.
Wallant writes some beautiful lines, ways of seeing that are another seduction. He makes the characters grotesque in the most human ways, describing the tenants in all their peculiar, disturbing complexity, finding details that fascinate as a child is fascinated by the strangeness of the world.
The story tips over at times into what you could call sappiness, but it's the kind of sappiness you find in the best depression era movies--it makes you feel good in spite of all the crap and misery you rub up against
I'd love to see this book transformed into a play, it's got great emotion in the language and the scenes, in the movement of the plot.
As I read I floated effortlessly along, enjoying the great injections of Wallant's love of the world and humankind, crud, mud, cuts and all, shining with nobility and dignity in the lowest places, arriving at the end with tears of laughter. I love art that draws together the extremes and in the contrast breaks you open with beauty and grief. Wallant pulls this off, and he's not subtle about it. I'm glad he had the guts to be so transparently transcendent.
That's not for everyone, but probably most people who open this book and start reading will want to keep reading, and will be sorry that the story can't keep going for a while longer.

I picked up Edward Lewis Wallant's THE TENANTS OF MOONBLOOM simply because I needed a vacation read and a book I had ordered failed to show up in the mail on time. Its premise is unpromising -- Norman Moonbloom, the ne'er-do-well younger brother of a slum lord, serves as an agent in charge of picking up rent from tenants in four New York City apartments. Wallant introduces you to so many quirky tenants that you think, "Hoo, boy. THIS is going to be a grind." But somehow he pulls it off. Somehow, despite their numbers, these eccentric tenants become easy to follow. They are that distinct. And they demand (no, command even) your attention after awhile.

Better yet, the beleaguered Norman begins to change. And what a change! As the tenants begin to influence our protagonist, the reader begins to sense the influence of, say, Charles Dickens -- particularly in his short masterpiece, A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Not that this is a Christmas story. It isn't. But Scrooge's shadow is long, and Norman falls into it, even though the circumstances and the personalities are entirely different. Read it. You'll see. It's a diamond in the rough. Well-written and, against all odds, beguiling in its leisurely way. Recommended as a "dark horse" read.

My husband and I both loved this book. The characters were extremely well developed. The plot was very realistic and the combination of oddball characters made the story full of life and humor. Easy to appreciate, whether you live in New York City or not.

At least Eggers is good for one thing -- maybe his name stuck to this great book will actually get it in the hands of readers. (Dave, don't you just wish you wrote as well as Wallant?)

Most people can't remember when writers actually wrote good books -- this is one of them. This guy also wrote "The Pawnbroker", another great novel.

Wallant is tough to describe: urban, gritty, but with real imagination and passion and dark humor. He knows a lot about anguish, a lot about being broke and battered spiritually. He's really a modern-day naturalist, like Frank Norris or Stephen Crane (of the shorter works...) or even Dos Passos (of Manhattan Transfer).

Maybe people are really sick of reading crap? Richard Yates's books are coming back (he was buddies with Wallant in the early 60s), now Wallant's...All we need to do now is get Brian Moore's early novels back in print. After you read Wallant, find Moore's "Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" and "An Answer from Limbo."

You won't be disappointed.

Frankly, this is one of those books which I find hard to say anything good or bad about. It's a pleasant read, filled with quiet wit, and anyone who's lived in New York will recognize most of the characters therein.

On the other hand, that's about it. The Tenants of Moonbloom isn't horrible. It's simply... uncompelling? Unmemorable? In any case, it's a novel which you can pick up, spend a few enjoyable hours with, then put down and forget all about. Then, months later, when you see it lying besides your sofa, you can begin the process all over again.