![]() ![]() ![]() As Bernard Malamud wrote in his third novel - called, appropriately enough, "A New Life" - "If this was spring, Levin knew it because he eternally hunted for it, was always nosing out the new season, the new life, 'a new birth in freedom.' " No story tells us more about ourselves than this quest for a new life, and few have told it better than Malamud did in that 1961 novel. In literature as in life: From Huck Finn to Jay Gatsby to Augie March to the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," over and over again in American literature we meet people who are in transit, looking for rebirth. ![]() The opportunity to build a new life is no less essential to our sense of who we are not merely is it why millions of people have immigrated to America over the generations, it is also why Americans themselves are constantly on the move, seeking better prospects than the ones they were born with. Personal liberty is so deeply ingrained in our culture that we rarely think about it it is as essential to the interior American landscape as amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties are to the exterior one. ![]() An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past ![]()
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