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Updike for the 21st Century: Let us Praise Him with Faint Damns
Peter Mehlman: Rabbit Reads. When John Updike gives a talk at the Writer's Guild Auditorium in Los Angeles, it's a big deal, roughly the equivalent of Georgio Armani stopping by the Dockers's showroom. But here Updike was last Tuesday night, all smiles, distinguished gray and Ivy elegance, gliding on stage to discuss literature in a town where full sentences leave a lot of people really wiped out. Drizzling a queasy vapor over the event was Michiko Kakutani's fairly savage review in that morning's New York Times of Mr. Updike's latest novel "Terrorist." On the ticket line, one woman shook her head and said, "How do you chit-chat about your book knowing the audience has all read a review like that?"  [The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]
You know, Updike is one of those late Twentieth Century icons whose work I always really felt I ought to like. His books are cerebral yet sensuous, exalted yet sensual, tender yet deep and incisive, vibrant yet insightful, and a whole host of other contradictory pairs of adjectives that I would readily concede to him (though he'd doubtless prefer to use much more obscure ones).
And the fact is, I do like some of it. I haven't read all of his novels---there were a couple I just could not manage to make myself read---but I did read a number of them. There were some I rather enjoyed reading, there are only three I've ever wanted to read again.--and for me, re-readability is the acid test for the book's importance on my personal scale.
And this is why, though I recognize that Updike is considered one of the important novelists of the Twentieth Century, he isn't at the end of the day at all important to me. When I think a writer is important, I go back again and again to the writer's work. I return to the well, thirsty for more of the same. The writers who matter to me didn't just embellish the world for me; they reframed it. Furthermore, they created characters I wanted desperately to know.
Salinger is rumored to be an unfriendly recluse, but he has created some of my favorite characters in fiction: Zooey and Franny Glass, good old Holden Caulfield, and Teddy from the short story 'Teddy.' I have re-read Franny and Zooey over a hundred times; and I wish that I could be hypnotized to forget it so I could come to it fresh all over again. That book had a profound effect on my spiritual and emotional development at a critical time in my life.
Similarly, I love and revere the ghost-seeing sister in Amy Tan's The One Hundred Secret Senses and the dutiful daughters in The Bone-Setter's Daughter. They too have changed my life by teaching me new ways of seeing.
Ursula LeGuin creates whole cultures I'd like to inhabit. The summer my father died, I used to lie in bed at night and imagine that I was one of the Kesh who [will have] lived in the town of Wakwaha-na in the Na River Valley---in what is now the Napa Valley---one million or so years from now. I had even decided which House I would belong to (the Serpentine) and what my name would be. My favorite story in the book was actually part of the subsidiary material, the story of the visionary, Flicker. But I loved all of it. I even tried some of the recipes (there was one for corn that was especially good).
Besides these fictional teachers, there are characters I have loved for their ability to make me laugh, I love H.H. Munro's (Saki's) sybaritic Clovis Sangrail and the young girl from The Open Window whose speciality was 'romance at short notice.' I love Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.
Another writer on my list of "most deeply satisfying writers" surprises most people. That writer is the erstwhile "angry young man," Kingsley Amis. "That misogynist pig?" said one of my friends. And I admit that he has created a number of characters who on the surface appear to be misogynists as well as a number of extremely unpleasant and/or difficult women. But each one of the characters I in theory ought to hate has a side above and beyond the misogyny that illuminates and redeems it---at least for me. And there is no one whose books have amused me more than dear old KA's. Lucky Jim is one of my five---assuming I could only choose five---desert island books.
Those are just some of the books that I love and that I've read over and over again.
Updike has never affected me in the same way as any of the writers I truly love. When (as a much younger woman) I was still interested in his books, I often said to myself, 'there's real wisdom here.' But even then I noticed that it was all wisdom of the sex-as-sacrament-and-path-to-enlightenment. After having had a certain amount of both, I have pretty much lost interest in that theme. If I were now to read a reference to someone's balls as, say, "nacreous spheres engendering the white-hot spume of eternity,"* I would not be moved, except possibly to raucous laughter. [*I made that one up, but it is definitely 'after Updike.']
I am also bothered by the way in which he portrays the relationship between the sexes. I say 'oddly' because Updike's characters are much less overtly misogynistic than, say, Kingsley Amis's. I suppose it's because although Amis's characters say horrible things about women, the horrible things they say don't seem (usually; I can certainly think of a few exceptions) with what they actually try to do. His characters actually work pretty hard to get on with the women in their lives; furthermore, though some of his female characters are extremely nasty, they are nasty out of general malice or spitefulness and by conscious choice, so I feel okay about loathing them or--in some instances---even rather liking them. I like many of Amis's characters, including some who are really rather nasty. I suppose they must seem real to me.
I can't think of a single woman in Updike I'd ever want to know or spend time with. At the end of the day, the women in his books strike me as marionettes. There's very much a sense when I read his work that the female characters have only as much reality as the male protagonists (and Updike through those characters) choose to grant to them. The male characters always seem to be holding back out of atavistic lust, rage, hatred and fear. In the end, the women tend to feel like thinly veiled capital-A Archetypes. Despite all the details he provides about their appearance, appetite, modes of thought, and public and private behavior, they just don't ring true to me.
Even when he makes his protagonist[s] female, I always feel in the end that I can't see the woman for whatever it is she represents to Updike (standing behind them in plain sight, working the strings).
Take for example the book The Witches of Eastwick. The three main characters were female and all were quite literally 'empowered' by (obscurely) their having been abandoned by their spouses. They develop strange powers which they then---boringly----totally waste on some man/demon lover and ultimately use to destroy a rival for his affections. I've seldom hated a book as much as I hated The Witches of Eastwick. Women banding together are a force of nature that can dog you down, man; FEAR US. It's not exactly a new idea under the sun; and in fact is a theme that seems to me to percolate through a lot of Updike's work.
And of course in addition to the TERROR OF FEMALE POWER UNLEASED, The Witches of Eastwick includes one hell of a CATFIGHT.
Contrast The Witches of Eastwick with one of my favorite novels, The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood. That book also involves three powerful women who band together to do battle with another female. In The Robber Bride, three gifted women form an alliance against one of the great female villains of modern literature. As she is incredibly powerful in her own right, the outcome is anything but a forgone conclusion. In the Atwood book, the temptress (correct word here) Zenia uses her sexual and intellectual powers to entrap and subsequently to destroy their men. Their alliance is the only thing that stands between them and the ruin of what remains to them when she's done. It's an amazing book, amazingly poignant in its portrayal of a strange friendship and the events that sustain them.
I like some of Updike's male characters. I like: [1] 'Rabbit' Angstrom, sort of; [2] the erring minister in A Month of Sundays, and...um, that's about it, really. The rest of those all seem to be either sad cases or head cases. While (in contrast to the women) most of them seem real enough, they are so brimming over with perceptiveness and sensitivity and strange insights that you just want to say, "Dude: take a prozac." So many of them seem to be the guy who can't finish up if you giggle during sex and who spends the rest of the night sulking and subsequently becomes incapable and blames it all on you..
I do realize that Updike is a master stylist. He is a compelling writer if you like your prose heavily embellished, as I sometimes do, and if you can machete your way through all the overwrough angst to some sort of core meaning. The meaning is sometimes there and accessible, but not always. In The Centaur, a humble schoolteacher is really the centaur Chiron; after being shot with an arrow, he becomes a constellation. Actually, I had, and have, no idea what in the Hell to make of that book. It was too grandiose and ineffable and allusive and so forth to be really moving (assuming the guy died in the end).
That book is beautifully written. I doubt that any American has ever written more poetically about sex, religion, or sex-as-religion and religion-as-sex. But it seems to me that the sexual taboos that his characters consciously and unconsciously resist gave his writing much of its force. To justify their decision to Do It, they work themselves up into frenzies of yearning, anxiety, spiritual torment, doubt, and excessive poetic metaphor. Unless the reader recognizes the framework in which the action of novels such as Marry Me and Couples takes place, the average person reading Updike for the first time is very likely to find the characters whom the reader is supposed to like irritating, solipsistic, deeply neurotic.
Two of the most annoying male characters I have ever encountered appear in those two books (though they seemed to me to be virtually the same character). I just wanted to slap them and their Archetypal Females upside the head and scream, "IT'S ONLY SEX, YOU MORONS. DO IT IF YOU'RE GOING TO AND LET'S MOVE ON."
Perhaps this urge simply reflects the extent to which the destruction of old taboos has drained all the real poetry out of sex and books about sex. Nowadays people can call a fuck a fuck; a married man about to commit adultery doesn't really need to get himself into an acceptable state to do the deed with a fellow schoolteacher by (somehow) morphing into the Centaur Chiron having very, er, athletic sex (his 'nether parts' are a horse's, right?) with 'amber-haired' Venus.
And Updike's whole sex-as-seeing-God thing is so pre-21st Century. At 27, I was shocked and impressed when one of his most annoying characters ever said in effect that sex is getting off with God. Today? Eh.
His books depend in may instances on his male (and female) characters are pushing against boundaries that no longer exist. Unfortunately, without the belief in capital-T Transgression there just is no capital-P Poetry or capital-S Sex It's just two people doing something that every animal and some plants can do.
I think one reason that A Month of Sundays---hands down my favorite Updike novel--- seems to me to have weathered the changing times is that it involves an adulterous minister, and therefore addresses a taboo that still exists. Ministers still ain't supposed to be interfering with their flocks. Since the minister in question is an intellectualizer with a guilty conscience, he cranks out some very pretty rationalizations (together with a fair amount of blasphemy) during his enforced sojourn at a 'rest home.' His badly mixing up his religious and sexual feelings makes sense in the circumstances..
If you're looking for summer reading, you could definitely do worse than A Month of Sundays. It seems to me to have a much lighter and dryer texture than Updike's other books and deals unweightily with the Great Imponderables.. In fact, it's hilarious and still retains the power to shock. Excellent summer reading.
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