Due Considerations
John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 703pp, £30
"After eight years, I was due for another collection of non-fictional prose," John Updike explains in the preface of his new compilation, Due Considerations. "I had hoped that, thanks to the dwindling powers of old age, the bulk would be significantly smaller than that of my two previous assemblages." At the final tally, however, Updike discovered that there "was less, but not significantly less. There was no escaping the accumulated weight of my daily exertions."
Of course, there was an escape from that accumulated weight - it is called editorial selection, a process that would have greatly enhanced this top-heavy book, which includes 62 book reviews, five long essays, a couple of dozen introductions to other books, as well as a host of tributes, musings on the visual arts, editorials and various other ephemera. Oddly, this all-inclusiveness tells us less about the author's sensibility than a more discriminatory approach might have done. As the reader watches Updike culture-hop from Emerson and Henry James to Coco Chanel and JFK Jr, the cumulative impression is not of a particular critical stance, but rather a work ethic that makes it impossible for Updike to say no to editors.
That said, there is plenty of fine writing here. Updike, 75 now, is increasingly concerned with last things. In the essay "Back from China", written nearly ten years ago, he hauntingly describes the feeling of mortality brought about by jet lag. "The dark bedroom seemed perilously weird - alien and glimmering at the edges as if with ultraviolet flashers. All the habits and illusions that protect me from the fact that I am sixty-six and nearing death had fallen from me, me in my pajamas and skin, unable to calculate where the bathroom was, wondering why this great curved surface of dread lay beneath my bare feet." Another long essay examines late works by writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Melville, Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch. "Death, one would think, naturally haunts late works; yet perhaps it does not . . . what does haunt late works are the author's previous works: he is burdensomely aware that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting."
Updike's book reviews show him to be a generous, incisive reader with no ideological axe to grind. By his own admission, he is sternest with his compatriots. "[Don] DeLillo's fervent intelligence and his fastidious, edgy prose, buzzing with expressions like 'wave arrays of information', weave halos of import around every event, however far-fetched and random. But the trouble with a tale where everything can happen is that somehow nothing happens." He tends to be more generous with non-American writers, such as Muriel Spark. "Has any fiction writer since Hemingway placed more faith in the simple declarative sentence, the plain Anglo-Saxon noun? Hemingway's style sometimes gives the impression of striking a pose, whereas Spark's appears to be merely getting on with it, brushing aside everything she might say but doesn't care to." The Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago is "a writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life by hurling words at it". This is not to say that Updike is easily snookered by every piece of foreign matter that crosses his desk, as evidenced by his reaction to Salman Rushdie: "His novels pour by in a sparkling, voracious onrush, each wave topped with foam, each paragraph luxurious and delicious, but the net effect perilously close to stultification."
Updike's non-fiction is at its best when it most closely intersects with his fiction. Asked by a newspaper to contribute a memory of JFK's assassination on its 40th anniversary, Updike's brief essay employs the tone of a short story to describe how he heard the dreadful news while having crowns put on his teeth. "I left the [dentist's] office, stepping into a bright and strangely still fall day, conscious of my smooth new crowns and of the fact that weird and terrible things can happen, in a land that would never seem as safe, secure and righteous again." In his review of a book about the 1960s sexual revolution, it is the novelist, not the critic, who reminds us that "secrecy is a great aphrodisiac. The Victorians found excitement in an exposed ankle; the Japanese, in the nape of a woman's neck. If every beach becomes a meaty sprawl of near-nudity and every date a compulsory copulation, we risk allowing sex to seem paltry." If, eight years down the road, Updike feels compelled to put forth another offering of his non-fiction, he might find it easier to seduce readers if he abandons his urge to bare all and instead acts as modestly as those Victorians and Japanese.
Stephen Amidon's "Human Capital" is published by Penguin
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