The Assistant is a book you brood over after finishing, because the questions its characters ask—what does it mean to be a Jew?—and the questionable actions they take—working for a man you have robbed at gunpoint, having sex with a woman you have just rescued from being raped—are the powerful relics of purpose-driven writing, of a time when books were serious examinations of some aspect of society, rather than formulaic accumulations of ideology.

Bernard Malamud intertwines the lives of two down-on-their-luck characters, Morris Bober, the Jewish owner of a failing grocery store in Brooklyn, and Frank Alpine, a drifter whose tenuous connection to the grocery store, its owner and his family devolves over time as the truth behind his motivation for helping out at the store is slowly revealed. Bober, as the archetypal Jew, struggles to overcome the harms inflicted on him by an unfair world; Alpine, haunted by images of Saint Francis of Assisi, struggles to overcome the self-inflicted harms resulting from his own poor choices.

The Assistant plays the boredom of working in a store where hours pass without a single customer and the slow process of wooing a reluctant woman against sudden, seemingly Deus ex machina acts of criminality and violence as the push and pull on Frank as he works out who he is. The use of an omniscient third-person narrator is particularly effective, subtly providing the reader multiple perspectives to highlight the contrasts between not just Bober and Alpine but also what each character of the novel portrays.

The Assistant is ultimately a redemption story which focuses on the worthiness of faith, regardless of whether one is rewarded, while leaving unresolved what Frank gains in converting to Judaism, relinquishing the metaphorical vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience he has taken in choosing to run Bober's store for a life of suffering implied through Bober's example. ( )

The Assistant: A Novel This book must be really old (1957) by judging by both its tenor and setting.
 
Initially I found it almost sepia to read but persevered and finished it. I cannot say I enjoyed it and I cannot say that I didn't. I quite liked the metamorphosis of the character of the assistant but didn't like the fatalism that pervades the whole thing.
 
Well written but not much lost if you don't ever read this. ( )

I read this book with a literary supplement helping me understand it, as the meaning seemed to be lost amidst the story, and I believe that this novel was simply not for me. The language read a little forced, dated, and waywardly. While it tried to focus on the characters, I found myself growing distracted and slightly irritated by the way that they approached things and dealt with their lives. Although this was on Time's Top 100 Books list, I felt as if it did not quite deserve that sort of literary aplomb. This was a disappointing read.

2 stars- barely. ( )

I very much enjoyed the writing style, and that we knew many of the characters, but not many details of their backstory. I was very interested in the content of the book and the fate of the characters. However, there were so many details I wish were better explained to those unfamiliar with Jewish History. I also felt there were too many unexpected and unbelievable incidents in the end. ( )

"It frustrated him hopelessly that every move he made seemed to turn into an inevitable thing." That's the essence of The Assistant, a modern version of Crime and Punishment set in a turn-of-the-century Jewish grocery. The portrait of the suffering Morris Bober is perfect and Malamud avoids the kind of sentimentality or easy answers that would make a novel in this setting unreadable. ( )