Book Review

Look back in reasonable reflections

Due Considerations

Old age becomes John Updike. While others rage against the dying of the light, he has evolved gracefully into a grand old man of letters, dispensing wise, measured judgement all around. This latest collection of essays, following fast on the heels of another fat volume, attests to a ferocious productivity: 54 reviews, 26 introductions and 65 assorted essays - 671 pages in all of gorgeous and sparkling prose. Updike's creative flair may have faded over the past decade, but his ability to generate sentences of consistently high quality remains unimpaired.   

Updike's culture is that of pre-Sixties America: good-humoured, decent and unashamedly bourgeois. He dislikes sloppy grammar, postmodernism and explicit descriptions of gay sex. Michel Houellebecq's misanthropy depresses him, as does the "abrasive irony and nihilism" of installation art. However, he is resolutely even-handed, acknowledging merit wherever he finds it. Even such uncongenial spirits as the novelists Hanif Kureishi and A.S. Byatt receive a fair hearing. So much reasonableness can fade into blandness. Not much of Updike himself is visible in his criticism, beyond the generic markers of class and culture. One misses the revealing quirkiness of, say, Tolstoy or Nabokov.

Also missing from this velvety expanse of fine writing is anything as substantial as an argument. Perhaps Updike has a mind too fine - as T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James - to be violated by an idea. But criticism, as opposed to fiction, needs a firm intellectual substructure. Updike's sinuous sentences too often serve to conceal the lack of such a substructure. One wouldn't guess from his essay on Iris Murdoch that she was the most philosophical of the post-war English novelists. An essay entitled "Late Works" contains acute observations on Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Shaw and James, but leaves us uncertain as to whether their late works really do have anything in common. And a review of a Kierkegaard biography devotes more space to the philosopher's hunchback than to his thought. Updike began his career as a draughtsman, and his imagination remains basically concrete and graphic. It is no surprise that some of the best essays in this collection are on cartoonists, particularly those old treasures of the New Yorker James Thurber and Saul Steinberg.

 Something resembling a theory of culture nonetheless lurks beneath this profusion of sensibility. The essay "The Future of Faith" comes close to an explicit credo, though even here argument is interwoven with narrative. Updike recalls the impression made during a tour of Italy by a Pontormo Annunciation, whose "electric, fruity colours" and "luminous floatingness" seemed to evoke the "annulment of universal gravity proposed by the Christian comedy". But a subsequent visit to the Venice Biennale brought him rudely down to earth. "The desire to shock the hardened art connoisseur into some kind of response had become veritably frantic; there was hardly an inch of the void, of disgust, of scorn left to expose, in this age of post-faith." For Updike, an Episcopalian Christian, the moral is plain. Without transcendence, the physical world is a prison, and art has no other function than to "hold the mirror up to the grimacing post-human". Later in the volume, Updike returns to the same theme. Why, he wonders, do modern novelists so often set their stories in the past? Could it be that "feelings then had a naiveté, a hearty force developed amid repression and scarcity and linked to a sense of transcendent adventure"? With no obstacles to its satisfaction, desire is trivialised, and can no longer sustain the slow development of character and action essential to the novel. Faith, society and art hang together; the loss of one implies the dissolution of the other two.

From the evidence of these essays, it seems that Updike's faith has evolved into the quiet, decorous variety, whose source is childhood memories and nostalgia for a certain kind of community. Gone are the demons of angst and nothingness that stalk his earlier novels. He admits that he was initially reluctant to accept the commission to write about the future of faith, fearing that it might "empty out of me the last drops of what feeble faith had got me this far". Elsewhere he quotes, without comment, Samuel Beckett's observation that the religion of his mother and brother was of no more use to them at the moment of death than "an old school tie". Is this an indirect confession?

Certainly the tides of faith run distinctly low in these recent essays. Much more to the fore is the other main theme of Updike's fiction - sex. Updike does not reveal much about his own erotic life, but has the odd habit of quoting at length from the steamiest section of whatever book he is reviewing. Descriptions of

debaucheries loom much larger than a purely literary interest would warrant. Often the tone is disapproving, putting one in mind of those guardians of public decency who scour with avid eyes the very material they execrate. Old age is meant to turn one's thoughts to eternity, but it seems to have fixed Updike's ever more firmly on the procedures of worldly generation.

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