Novel: The Tenants

Summary
The Tenants centers on Harry Lesser, an aging Jewish novelist who refuses to abandon a dilapidated Manhattan tenement as surrounding residents leave. He takes solitary possession of the building, hoarding the quiet and space he needs to write. When a young Black writer moves into the only other occupied apartment, a charged cohabitation begins that quickly turns from wary tolerance to bitter antagonism.
Their rivalry is as much about competing claims to language and narrative as it is about neighborhood turf. Both men jealously guard their work and their right to be heard, and the decaying structure itself becomes an arena for escalating psychological warfare. The novel builds a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere in which artistic obsession intersects with race, possession, and self-destruction.

Main characters
Harry Lesser is introduced as a stubborn, solitary artist who clings to the tenement as a refuge for his craft. He embodies pride, insecurity, and a fierce proprietorial instinct toward his writing life, displaying both humane sympathies and brittle resentments. The newcomer, a Black novelist, arrives as a counterforce: talented, assertive, and determined to claim his space. Their encounters quickly expose mutual fears, unexamined prejudices, and the corrosive effects of rivalry.
Secondary figures appear mainly as echoes of a failing neighborhood: landlords, former tenants, and city bureaucrats who hint at urban change and abandonment. The building and its emptiness act like an additional character, a physical and symbolic stage where the protagonists' struggle plays out.

Themes
Possession operates on several levels: physical ownership of rooms and corridors, proprietary claims over language and subject matter, and the deeper, existential idea of who has the right to tell certain stories. Racial tension is never a mere backdrop; it inflects every exchange and complicates questions of empathy and antagonism. Malamud probes how identity and art can be weaponized against a perceived rival and how artistic rivalry can mingle with social grievance to lethal effect.
The novel also examines solitude and the artist's hunger for recognition. Jealousy and fear drive much of the action, but there is also sympathy for the vulnerable human instincts beneath the posturing. Themes of decay and renewal, of cities, relationships, and moral boundaries, permeate the narrative, lending the story a mournful urgency.

Style and tone
Malamud's prose is spare, muscular, and often unadorned, creating a claustrophobic intensity well suited to the novel's confined setting. Dialogue crackles with tension and exposes characters' inner contradictions, while descriptive passages render the tenement as both real and allegorical. The tone shifts between bitter realism and moral interrogation, refusing easy judgments even as it indicts certain impulses.
The narrative's close focus on psychological conflict gives the book a pressure-cooker quality. Scenes feel immediate and contained; the city outside looms only as noise and displacement, while the interior lives of the two writers sharpen into a moral and artistic duel.

Reception and significance
The Tenants provoked strong reactions on publication and has remained one of Malamud's most discussed later works. Critics praised its moral complexity and the daring way it entangles questions of race and artistic ownership, while some readers were unsettled by its uncompromising portrayal of rivalry and hatred. The novel continues to be read as a powerful study of the perils of possessiveness, of place, of language, and of identity, and as a bleak, compelling meditation on what creative life can cost when human frailty and social fault lines collide.