BOO KS
135
nothing might be said simply. This rule applies even when all that's in–
volved is an empty stomach - "Hunger questioned his vaporous head"
- or a full bladder - "His kidneys signaled: the sweetness pealing of
a silent bell: relieve me" - or a drained glass - "The olive egg in his
martini had been abandoned by its mother high and dry." There is also
a handsome display of devices usually reserved for poetry: "Wounded
by winning, he bowed his head and with suppliant lips took a nipple,
faintly salt and sour, in." Reading to the rhythm of these aggressive
sound effects becomes as irritating as finding oneself marching down
the street to the rat-a-tat-tat of the drum in some distant parade. Nabo–
kov does this kind of thing, but there is irony in the way Nabokov's
language dandles and preens itself, a cold hearted economy that keeps
it from becoming florid or bathetic. In Updike's writing the richness
of the language seems an uncontrolled surface proliferation, like the
growth of a creeper, indiscriminate and obscuring.
The same excessive cleverness afflicts the treatment of feeling and
action. The characters, even the ones who didn't go to college, think
and speak about themselves with the detachment and sophistication of
an analyst with a patient. Their deepest motives are articulated so con-
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