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grasps the entire outside of its subject. I go on about this because I don't
understand why a writer would choose to use this kind of wryly amused and
sophisticated cleverness
to
deal with a subject that does not respond to
it-that, in fact, resists it tenaciously except on the level of bedroom farce–
which is rarely farcical and never sexual. I suspect that this mode allows
Mr. Updike's romantic sensibility full play. With it, he can most certainly eat
his world. But he can't have it too.
Then we have the characters. Mr. Updike is of that school that holds that
characters are the sum of their parts, i.e., add layer upon layer of description
touching upon modes of dress, manners, speech, habitations, possessions,
mores, etc., and presto! we know who the character is and how he will act in a
given circumstance, we know, that is, his reality. Conversely, if we know what
he says and thinks, we know what he will wear, his tastes, and so on. The
author partakes, in other words, of the tried and true novelistic signals in
ordering his characters' activities and lives. An odd sophistry of causality
inheres in such constructions. Jane, Marshfield's wife, is prim, proper, intelli–
gent, educated, athletic.
It
routinely follows that she is sexually unsatisfying
to Marshfield; she is civilized when she is confronted by his lover, and so on.
His lover is slightly shabby, a trifle vulgar, rather embarrassingly emotional,
and divorced. She, ofcourse, lives in a raw, new housing development; she is
crass when she meetsJane, etc. The reader almost expects Mr. Updike
to
make
her chew gum and subscribe to the
Reader's Digest.
Marshfield's assistant is
young, soupy-minded, liberal, "against the war." His attitude toward, for
instance, young people with drug problems? You guessed it . And on and on.
The signals flash, the attitudes stiffen, the characters "walk off the pages."
This is the kind ofcharacterization one expects from Neil Simon, an effortless
sliding into the path of least resistance .
It
has little to do with the making of
serious fiction .
Yet all these things that I touch upon are reckoned by Mr. Updike's
admirers-and they are many-as strengths, not weaknesses, as wonders of
truth, style, audacity, vision, even as indications of greatness. But each page
of this book throws up a wall behind which it is well-nigh impossible to dis–
cover the manifold realities of the world that the author chooses to deal with.
Weare given this world as seen by Mr. Updike, as interpreted by him. We are
given wit and talent and we are given invention. But we are not given liter–
ature.
Oddly (and sadly) enough, this kind of fiction is often thought to be
poetic, though it has nothing to do with poetry unless one conceives of the
poem as a bauble. On the other hand, Hugh Kenner has termed this sort of
writing" a surface scummed by iridescent prose. ' , That strikes me as both just
and exact.
GILBERT SORRENTINO
