266
PARTISAN REVIEW
the band of adolescent squatters-vaguely Afro-American-Latino-who
have been squatting on his land and seem to be part of the new criminal
authority to whom he pays "protection" money. Ben's relation with them
becomes ambiguously compliant. He enters into their mischief and encour–
ages them to burn down (for evasion of "tax") a neighbor's beach house
which has long obstructed his view. He is allowed to play sex games with
one of them, a thirteen year-old girl-and we are treated again to Updike's
detached descriptions of the adventures of Ben's phallus, a sort of brother–
self he tenderly cherishes and sympathizes with. Indeed, we begin to realize
that this is the only meaningful relation he is capable of-and to appreciate
the depth of sorrow that comes to him when that other is laid low.
Like DeLillo, Updike feels a twinge of novelistic desire to find some
coherent positive message, and he offers an unconvincing promise, in the
appearance of the torus, of an eventual "blissful certainty of universal recon–
ciliation." But there is really no escaping the point of view of his latest
representative of our species-this egotistic sensualist who is what we may
survive to be in our culture's old age. Ben writes his own story as a journal
kept through four seasons, and he has all the benefit of his creator's mastery
of purling sentences, his sensitivity to the beauty of the changing New
England landscape as well as his power to observe the ridiculous in human
behavior. But, like Updike himself, he does not expect to tell one of those
stories novels used to abound in. Of these he says, at the end, "I read a lot,
in my ignominious, tender, doze-prone state, avoiding the emotional stress–
es of fiction-that clacking, crudely carpentered old roller coaster, every up
and down mocked by the triviality, when all is said and done, of human
experience, its Sisyphean repetitiveness-and sticking to the alternate lives,
in time and space, of history and the
National Geographic."
Updike's own
weariness permeates the book too and leaves the reader dissatisfied as much
with his depressing postmodern protagonist as with the offhand non-tale
that l).e tells.
Margaret Drabble makes the personal seem product cranked out by
modern British history. As one of her characters in
The Radiant Way,
pub–
lished in 1987, says, "We are not ourselves, we are crossroads, meeting places,
points on a curve, we cannot exist independendy for we are nothing but
signs, conjunctions, aggregations." Her cri tics have been quick to see as a
fault the fact that her characters tend to be gingerbread figures cut out by the
determinants of class or ideology. They are sociological abstracts with traits
too conventionally familiar. We miss that sense of the mystery of personali–
ty which vitalizes the novels of greater realists. Still, she has an observing eye,
a witty style, an interest in ideas and conditions for their own sake--and
maybe you can call her a sort of lesser Aldous Huxley for our time.
The Witch
if
Exmoor
is Drabble's first novel to follow the trilogy of the
