Malamud, in his daughter's eyes

He ran to get help, saving her life. "We were in his study ... in Vermont when he told me [the story]," Smith recalls. "I was in my twenties. He said nothing about his feelings at the time, focusing instead on his lifesaving effort. Fifty years later, it may still have been the only bearable cast."

As Bernie went from strength to strength in high school and City College, reading, writing, acting, and trying, without much success, to play a decent game of baseball, he was increasingly anxious over the fate of his younger brother, a gentle and intelligent individual who succumbed to mental illness.

He felt guilt, shame, and fear on one hand, while on the other, a passionate love of literature and a burning desire to become a writer. From this potent amalgam emerged the somewhat Chekhovian strain of his literary art: thoughtful, sometimes humorous, always poignant, and deeply humane.

Whether drawing on his father's struggles as a grocer for his Brooklyn-based novel "The Assistant," or going beyond that in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Fixer" to tell the far more dreadful story of anti-Semitism and injustice in the Beilis case, which took place in the Russia his parents had fled, Malamud was firmly committed to imbuing his fiction with an ethical vision. Which is not to say that Smith goes in for hagiography. Indeed, what's so impressive about her approach is its clear-eyed, thoughtful honesty.

Although she loved and admired her father, Smith is cognizant of the damaging ways in which his attitudes and actions affected their little nuclear family. Like many others of his generation, Malamud was an automatic male chauvinist. Not only did he assume that his wife's needs ought to be subordinated to his own, he feared self-assertive traits in women, dividing the gender into "good" ones and "destructive" ones. He married an intelligent, supportive Italian-American, who pretty much filled the bill. But while teaching at Bennington College in the '60s, Malamud didn't resist what his daughter calls the "harem" culture. The campus was rife with professors having affairs with students. Malamud had at least one affair with a girl who wasn't much older than Smith.

Compared to contemporaries like Mailer, Roth, and Bellow, Malamud wasn't much of a womanizer, but Smith rightly communicates the extent to which his behavior was hurtful to his family.

An unexpected pleasure of the book is Smith's portrait of her idyllic 1950s childhood, growing up in Corvallis, Ore., where her father taught college before landing his job at Bennington.

Analytical without being acrimonious, honest without wallowing in self-preening exposure, this is a wise, generous book full of insights on what it's like to be a writer and to be a writer's daughter.

• Merle Rubin is a freelance book reviewer in Pasadena, Calif.

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