120
PARTISAN REVIEW
The moon peered crookedly over his shoulder, curious enough to tilt
its head .
The blue night barked as I opened the door.
It might however be argued , fairly enough, that this is not Mr. Updike 's
voice, since the novel purports to be a diary
I
journal kept by the Reverend
Thomas Marshfield , the narrator. In fact , the flap copy, taking note of this ,
bubbles that the minister's confessions are rendered in a "wonderfully over–
wrought style ." This might legitimize the flaws of the novel except for the fact
that Marshfield's style as given inA
Month a/Sundays
is the author's in other
books. The only one I have to hand is
Pigeon Feathers,
but haphazard rum–
maging through it turns up-in the third person-the same "wonderfully
overwrought style ."
The walls of the college buildings, crusty and impregnable , swept past
like an armada of great gray sails.
Which, in its way, is almost as shiny and meaningless as this fragment of
Wilde's:
It
seemed
to
me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of
rose-coloured joy . She trembled all over, and shook like a white narcissus.
Both specimens work to remove us from the matter under observation ; the
comparisons muddy the things compared; the adjectives function so as to give
us the appearance of specificity, lest we see the rabbit being put into the hat.
These are triumphs of that sensibility that cannot leave off worrying the world
into its own design . I cannot accept the Reverend Marshfield's style as being
his own-Mr. Updike's other works of fiction display the same style with
endem.ic consistency.
There are a couple of other things to say about this novel. While it is not
" about" sex, sex is the engine that drives it. However, it is neither porno–
graphic nor filled with the grim and humorless details of the post-Sadean
technologist. It does not stand in breathless awe of sex-as-mystery as invented
and patented by Lawrence .
It
is-what can I say?-amused .
It
is witty and
bored and knowing . There is nothing of the comic in the novel-Mr. Updike
cannot make anyone laugh . The comic writer accepts reality as intelligible in
itself, not as a poor drab thing that awaits his gilding . Comic things are inher–
ently comic and we laugh when the comic intelligence reveals their essential
essence, when it recognizes them . Wittiness does not recognize, it explains.
It
gives us an " insight" into its subject whereas it seems to me that the comic
