"What do you write?..." asks a hitch-hiking sailor in one of John Updike's 1960s short stories. "Oh-whatever comes into my head," answers David Kern (an Updike alter ego). As Updike records in his memoirs, critics of his early books complained that he "wrote all too well but had nothing to say," or compared him to a quick child delineating with dazzling brilliance the surface of the adult world. Sometimes, in comparison with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the other writers in the great American triumvirate, he can seem morally lightweight. In Rabbit Remembered (a novella in this collection of short stories), the dead Rabbit's relatives celebrate the turn of the millennium, but no one reflects on the cataclysms of the last century-the remembrances are all from previous Rabbit books. And in these books, which deliberately chronicle America in the last 40 years, Vietnam is oddly absent. American attitudes to race are charted in Rabbit Redux and changes in them are alluded to in these short stories, but Updike is never as serious on the subject as Roth in The Human Stain. In few Updike stories and only three of his 19 novels are characters seriously troubled by God, religion or even angst, other than the fear of death.
Weighty themes aren't statutory for great writers. Yet surely moral seriousness is. But Updike, whose predominant themes are the personal and parochial-sex, adultery and childhood-seems pledged to portray what he has called "the uncanny innocence of promiscuity." In The Women Who Got Away, a character comments that "the 1960s had taught us the high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on an activity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy." Even if this is partly whimsical, Updike's work is stuffed with male sex fantasy. And it is not only female readers who are weary of ploughing through it-the novelist David Foster Wallace has labelled Updike one of "the post-war Great Male Narcissists." Wives, mistresses and children seem mere ciphers, backdrops to the central (autobiographical) drama. Sometimes the reader, pulling out of the luxurious prose in indifference, impatience or repulsion, is unsure about whether there is any universal significance in Updike's childhood town of Shillington, Pennsylvania, David Kern's Olinger, and Rabbit's Brewer, or in the minutiae of their changes over time. Do we really care about the similar copulations, adulteries and divorces of the Maples, the Angstroms, Sally and Jerry, the couples in Couples and in the short stories, or the musings of an ignorant car-salesman? Yet Updike is like one of those psychological drawings which alternately flickers between being one creature or another. Having appeared so superficial and thin one instant, he seems rich and profound the next. You can do a duck/rabbit on Rabbit. Amoral, egoistic, coarse, uneducated, he is alternatingly-or simultaneously-full of pathos, significance, beauty, life.
But is the profundity, too, an illusion, induced by his prose? Updike is a fine stylist, aiming for "styles of tender exploration that... wrap themselves around the things, the tints and voices and perfumes, of the apprehended real." His images can evoke not just an experience's precise quiddity, but in the same stroke illuminate the characters and situation in which it is enmeshed.
Updike, both in his own persona and as Henry Bech, has praised Nabokov (another novelist sometimes accused of the brilliantly nugatory) as the best then-living English prose-writer, and rejects the exhortation to "inconspicuous or invisible language." He can overdo it. The language sometimes draws attention to itself in a distracting way. But like poetry, his prose startles aesthetic sense and intellect simultaneously, aurally as well as visually, his ear for cadence and melody being perfect. Scenes from the Fifties begins: "Yes. Time does pass. The other day I read that Harold 'Doc' Humes had died. I knew Doc slightly; hundreds of people did. He was a writer and conversationalist famous, or bucking for fame, in the Fifties..." And on Updike's narrator goes, into a flowing account of what Doc looked like and wrote, ending his first paragraph, "The last time I saw him he was playing chess with Marcel Duchamp at the party that sealed my departure from New York City." The prose is easy and exact, like Mozart. The details he throws in seem at first incidental, bizarre, like the possibility that Doc Humes' teeth contain a British intelligence radio device naggingly alerting him to cold war secrets, or like Duchamp himself, whose hand the narrator shakes, and his "celebrated trinkets of ironic disaffection." Why those details? Why that narrator, a would-be artist dreamily drifting round New York parties, half-heartedly trying to seduce "a Venus de Milo with arms," before returning to his wife and child and going to the wrong railway station? In this, as in all his best stories, they turn out to be delicately placed clues, although not to any definite climax. As a result of the narrator's mixed signals, a man at the station tries to pick him up, much to his terror; but he is telling the story as a silver-haired antique-dealer, who has not only abandoned art for antiquities, but his wife for a man. In hands less masterly (or perhaps less intransigently heterosexual), this might have been a "coming out" story. But it is far more interesting and universal. The narrator presents his change of sexuality as incorrigibly dreamy and irresolute-did he discover, create or drift into it?-and the predominant feeling is loss: of youth, time, opportunities.
Updike's fiction is permeated with loss. David Kern (appearing here in Lunch Hour) attends class reunions because "the basic treasure of his life was buried back there, in the town of Olinger [Shillington], and he kept hoping to uncover it." Updike and his characters are children manqué. Everything becomes an Eden-the forsaken first marriage recollected from the second, an abandoned affair recalled from the marriage that was preserved; the space never to be probed again in a woman, once fucked, now dead. The Rabbit sagas have spanned enough time in Rabbit's life and our own recent century to have generated their own nostalgia. Proust's motifs (madeleine, hawthorn, church spire) are epiphanic and lovely in themselves; his philosophical, literary and artistic reflections are richer than Updike's, yet the crisscrossing of characters, remembrances, flashbacks, places, in Updike's books, have engendered a Proustian sense of antiphony and depth.
It is not just childhood and youth, the irrecoverable past-when "life was a distant adventure, a rumour, an always imminent joy"-that is lost. So are, in the present, the unadopted options, the other possible worlds which cannot all be actual. Describing the 1960s-era, Couples-like town in Natural Color, the narrator remembers: "You lived in other people's houses as much as you could; there was an ache to being in your own, a nagging unsuppressible suspicion that happiness was elsewhere." New York is "like a party where something wonderful may happen the minute after you leave." In the 1977 introduction to his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, Updike Proustianly spoke of "the taste of time that flavours all novels, that makes their events more portentous than the events of our lives, where time passes unnoticed, but for the rare shudder..." Here, in How Was It Really? Don, nostalgic for his first marriage, attends his daughter's boat-party with his second wife. He observes the "gnashing conversations" and the twilight river. "That was how it was, how it had been, the living moment awash with beauty ignored in the quest for a better moment, slightly elsewhere, with some slightly differing other, while the weeds grew in the peony beds, and dust balls gathered beneath the sofa, and the children, unobserved, plotted their own escapes, their own elsewheres."
The 1960s story ended with David Kern's answer to the sailor: "We in America need ceremonies, is I suppose, sailor, the point of what I have written." What Updike does is sacralise the mundane-less by a protagonist's sudden flash of illumination, as many writers do, than by the accumulation of detail. "A piece of turf torn from a meadow becomes a gloria when drawn by D?rer." So can a Mr Peanut sign by Updike. Sometimes it seems that his writing itself, more than the thoughts or experiences he writes about, is the illumination. He is (in Bech's words) "determined not to generalise away the miracle, the quizzical quiddity, of the specific." For Updike, who once wanted to be a painter, the surface is in some ways all there is; the novel or story simply represents itself. But where his true depth lies is in his apprehension of the tantalising impossibility of depth-and that however intensely we live, however beautifully he describes, ultimately, as Edward Thomas wrote, "I cannot bite the day to the core."
