"The Mourners"
In this story, a man comes round to inform one Mr. Gruber that their landlord has given him an eviction notice. He does so with a good amount of glee as he yells through the closed door. And then, Mr. Gruber finally appears and the glee dissipates:
“He looked, in the act of opening the door, like a corpse adjusting his coffin lid.”
“The Last Mohican”
Similes tend to gain power through familiarity: the simpler the better as far as reaching the greatest number of readers. Sometimes, however, one comes across a metaphorical image that is perfect to those who understand it, but just as equally meaningless to those who do not. Such is the case here:
“The synagogue was unheated and the cold rose like an exudation from the marble floor.”
Exudation: the process by which a fluid rises from the circulatory system to exit through the skin. In other words, the cold from the marble floor was appearing like blood (or pus, if you want to get a little more graphic) through an open wound. Clearly, not the easiest simile to understand, but then again Malamud is a literary writer writing to a fractional demographic of the population. He is not Stephen King, though it must be admitted that this comparison would work equally well in a horror story.
"The Magic Barrel"
Sometimes, it only takes one precisely composed metaphorical image to tell a reader all they really need to know about that character’s appearance. In this case, it is a very short, simple, to-the-point and immediately recognizable metaphor which does the trick:
“The marriage broker, a skeleton with haunted eyes, returned that very night.”
"The Girl of My Dreams"
This story concludes (next to last paragraph, actually) with a very artfully constructed series of metaphors. One of the marks of a good writer is the ability to create closing lines (or close enough) that would serve equally well as opening lines. That is the case here:
“Spring. It gripped and held him. Though he fought the intimacy he was the night’s prisoner as he moved toward Mrs. Lutz’s.”
"The Loan"
Indeed, Malamud is equally good at opening lines; one could argue his openings are usually even stronger than his closings. The opening paragraph of this story moves with an inexorable sense of dread and paranoia toward the richly metaphoric imagery which draws that paragraph to its close:
“…he signaled with a deprecatory nod…though his face glittered with misery. If suffering had marked him, he no longer sought to conceal the sign; the shining was his own—him—now.”
