Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Who cut the cheese? Bad smells pollute the air in The Assistant. When something stinks, it's usually rotten—a sign of dying dreams or of villainy.
Time itself stinks for Morris Bober, the poor old store owner who can never seem to catch a break. "When times were bad time was bad," we read. "It died as he waited, stinking in his nose" (1.1.14). When later Morris is confined to bed so he can heal, he senses the absence of customers in the store below his house: "the smell of death seeped up through the cracks in the floor" (8.1.3).
Frank's life also gathers a bad odor in the story. His past "stupendously stunk up the now," and feels he needs to change his life "before the smell of it" suffocates him (4.5.5). After raping Helen, Frank is filled with regret and an overbearing sense of the wrong he's done. This too is depicted in the language of smell:
He smelled garbage in the bed and couldn't move out of it. He couldn't because he was it—the stink in his own broken nose. What you did was how bad you smelled. (7.2.2)
Bernard Malamud, the author of The Assistant, sure takes the expression "It stinks!" to a whole new level. He's not describing smells that are literally there, as if anyone with a nose would detect them, but the smells are not simply metaphorical either. They exist strongly and pungently for those who can detect them.