In Philip Roth’s new novel, his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, alludes in passing to a once famous writer now largely forgotten, whose “sense of virtue is too narrow” for contemporary readers. The writer, no doubt about it, is Bernard Malamud. And what is it that passes for virtue in Malamud? In The Assistant, a grim and slender novel, the Jewish groceryman is eulogized as “a man that never stopped working ... to make a living for his family,” a man who “worked so hard and bitter,” so that for his family there was “always something to eat.” Morris Bober was “a good provider,” the rabbi says, and, “besides,” he was “honest.” He assumed responsibilities. He showed up. He is to be venerated, without exaggeration or ceremony.

It is a narrow sense of virtue, to be sure, and not at all peculiar to Malamud among American Jewish writers. Saul Bellow, too, a provocateur who writes in a racy, unstable idiom and sometimes expresses a venomous antipathy toward the milder emotions, nonetheless swells with admiration for those who show and claim affection, who know, as we used to say, how to behave. “I saw now what I had done,” says the narrator in Bellow’s novella “Cousins”: “treated him with respect, observed his birthdays, extended to him the love I had felt for my own parents. By such actions, I had rejected certain revolutionary developments of the past centuries, the advanced views of the enlightened, the contempt for parents illustrated with such charm and sharpness by Samuel Butler....” Susceptible to the allure of subversive ironies and modern ideas, the Bellow protagonist is still responsive to what he calls “the old thoughtfulness.”

The narrow virtues have often seemed narrow precisely because they were thought to require little thought. Often they have seemed feeble and gray because they were believed to entail no struggle, no weighing of choices. Habit, it is often felt, is the paralysis of spirit. Ordinariness is the negation of virtue. What is dull and dutiful and comes more or less naturally is not to be prized. But Malamud and Bellow (and in this they were not altogether alone) hoped to identify in the ordinary activities available to any decent and thoughtful person, in social ritual and mundane interaction, a stay against the inhuman, against the brutality that ensues in the absence of the quotidian ideals and restraints.

Now Philip Roth engages this possibility. In his new novel, he examines decency, as it is embodied in a good-hearted man whose life seems for a while “most simple and most ordinary and therefore just great.” No reader will be surprised to find that such a life turns out to be neither simple nor just great. No one will wonder at Roth’s ability to show what can become of “ordinary” when an orderly life takes an unexpected turn, or the repressed rears its head, or the good and measured life seems suddenly tedious and intolerable. Roth has for a long time, through many books, developed a powerful and unanswerable subversion of the rock-solid assurances around which many people attempt to organize their lives. He has taught his readers to hold their noses when confronted by pious reflections on “the human condition.” An expert in apostasy and distortion, he has made of his own occasional attraction to moralizing rhetoric an opportunity for savage contradictoriness and wit. His present interest in the ordinary and the virtuous is new in the sense that they now hold him, tempt him, transfixed and bewildered, in a degree not generally discernible in his earlier fiction.

The ordinary man in American Pastoral is an assimilated Jew with an unlikely “steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask” and the youthful attributes of a demi-god. The young Seymour “Swede” Levov is a star athlete worshiped by everyone in his neighborhood in Newark, a large “household Apollo” of an adolescent who goes on from schoolboy fame to marry a Catholic beauty queen, inherit a thriving business, and move his family to a prosperous farm in rural New Jersey. The Swede is ordinary only in the sense that he shapes his life to the measure of the American dream, aspiring to no more and no less than his share of perfection, which is to say, an existence largely without misgiving or menace.