The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  Unlike Roth, Kepesh is seventy already. As the book opens he is looking back on an affair that began nearly a decade earlier. It lasted a year and a half and took twice that long to recover from. The owner of the brassiere, which is exhaustively established as “a D cup”—“powerful, beautiful breasts,” “gorgeous breasts,” “really big, beautiful breasts,” “the most gorgeous breasts I have ever seen,” “they’re so beautiful, her breasts. I cannot say it often enough”—is a bourgeois Cuban-American called Consuela, and she is, or was, twenty-four. This is not a book (and this is not a book review) for leg men, or for butt men, or for prudes.

  Kepesh is mainly a radio and TV pundit nowadays, but he still does a senior seminar called Practical Criticism. “I attract a lot of female students,” he notes on page 1. “They are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be.” These young women are gallantly described as “meat.” For some years now, what with all that harassment-hotline claptrap, Kepesh has been postponing his approaches until he is “no longer officially in loco parentis”—“so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life.” When Consuela comes to his office he keeps the door open, making sure that “all eight of our limbs…[are] visible to every Big Brother of a passerby.” After the grades are in he always throws a party at his duplex for the purposes of decompression and weeding out. Consuela seems game. And during their first date she sits on his sofa “with her buttocks sort of half turned to me”:

  All that we’d talked about, all that I’d had to listen to about her family, none of it has interfered. She knows how to turn her ass despite all that.

  Turns in the primordial way. In display. And the display is perfect.

  It tells me that I need no longer suppress the wish to touch.

  Consuela is still a student. And although Kepesh is no longer her teacher, she’s still in need of tuition. Generally speaking, hers is “a generation of astonishing fellators,” yet Consuela, at first, “would move her head with a relentless rat-a-tat-tat rapidity” and then go passive at the key moment. “I could have been coming into a wastepaper basket.” And we can’t have that. “No one had ever told her not to stop working then”—until her professor enlightens her. It still isn’t that great (too efficient and narcissistic), but then “something happened. The bite. The bite back. The biting back of life.”

  I propose to quote from this episode at length (and bear in mind that Roth has always been a transgressive writer):

  [I] shoved a couple of pillows back of her head, propped up her head like that, angled it like that up against the headboard, and with my knees planted to either side of her and my ass centered over her, I leaned into her face and rhythmically, without letup, I fucked her mouth. I was so bored, you see, by the mechanical blow jobs that, to shock her, I kept her fixed there, kept her steady by holding her hair, by turning a twist of hair in one hand…like the reins that fasten to the bit of a bridle.

  A sixty-two-year-old “so bored” by blow jobs? A sixty-two-year-old not only still screwing his students but still headboarding them? To adopt a Portnoyan formulation, Kepesh puts the sex back into sexagenarian. He records Consuela’s response:

  After I came, when I drew away, Consuela looked not just horrified but ferocious. Yes, something is finally happening to her…. I was still above her—kneeling over her and dripping on her—we were looking each other cold in the eye, when, after swallowing hard, she snapped her teeth. It was as though she was saying, That’s what I could have done, that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I didn’t do.

  And this changes everything for the sexually adversarial hero. Her “elemental response” (and she will get even more “primordial”) awakens an elemental response in him: love.

  Many readers, perhaps, will be feeling that some moral accountancy is long overdue. Now, it would be priggish, and philistine, to cluck at this if Kepesh were a major and powerfully functioning artist (like Philip Roth, for instance). But Kepesh is not an artist; with his Porsche, his piano, and his punditry, he is just another cultural middleman. He has a friend who is a poet as well as a fellow satyromaniac, and that’s his only claim to the license of bohemianism. Once the girls get their grades, remember, Kepesh considers that he is “no longer officially in loco parentis.” All that means is that he is now unofficially in loco parentis: thus he acts in clear and serial violation of authority and trust.

  There is no indication in the text that Kepesh has ever troubled his head with this question. He imagines that he is rendering Consuela a great service; he it was who “fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation.” Similarly, when wondering why a young woman would want to go to bed with an old man, he neglects the obvious idea that it has to do with filial confusion. Consuela’s parents—rich, churchgoing, and Hispanic—seem to have been designed for maximal, indeed sanguinary outrage if they learned of their daughter’s affair, but Kepesh admits to no unease. Toward the end he has a crisis encounter with Consuela, now thirty-two, who reveals that her subsequent affairs were all “no good.” Kepesh doesn’t feel guilty; he just feels jealous. Rounding out the long list of things that never occur to him is a political objection: gender asymmetry. Show me the lady prof of sixty (or seventy: read on) who still splashes her way through her male students.

  Curiously, and however slantedly, Kepesh sees the whole deal as political—as revolutionary, in fact. When the 1960s happened, the professor of desire made a pig of himself, like everyone else, but did so with a steely eye. Here was an opportunity “to live out my own revolution”: “How does one turn freedom into a system?” He left home (“I have a son of forty-two who hates me”) and went on systematizing freedom into his “unmonastic” old age. He realizes that his behavior is repellent to the conventional world, but the feeling is mutual. The wife-child stuff is itself “childish,” an “archaic addiction” to “the pathos of feminine need.” His mission is “to live intelligently beyond the blackmail of the slogans and unexamined rules”—particularly the one about May and December.

  Roth, then, does not equip Kepesh with moral clarity. He goes at it the other way. He equips him with rationalizations—and with suffering. When love enters the Dec-May picture, the only possible outcome is continuous pain. An adored twenty-four-year-old, it turns out, does not make an old man very happy. She makes a happy man very old, saturating him with an awful dreamlike weakness and a sense of desperate fragility. The refinements of this pain, its pathos and bathos, are presented with decisive force. So much so that the book tops up one’s view that marriage (to adapt Churchill on democracy) is the worst imaginable kind of human arrangement, except for all the other kinds. But Kepesh wouldn’t be a Roth hero if he weren’t absolutely incorrigible. This is a “spoken” novel, addressed to an unidentified listener. We learn that the listener is young, and we know that the listener is unlikely to be male. Then we click: she’s the next one.

  A spoken novel needn’t be underwritten. Portnoy’s Complaint was spoken (to Dr. Spielvogel), but Roth stylized the confession and was able to write flat-out. The Dying Animal is candidly conversational, and such stylization as it deploys tends to take it even nearer to the top of the head, with outbreaks of mere telegramese. This isn’t surprising, perhaps, after the high style, the big prose game, of what I will venture to call Roth’s American Century trilogy, namely (in reverse order) The Human Stain, I Married a Communist, and American Pastoral. And it may be that the nature of Kepesh’s tale precluded the need for a dignified verbal surface. Of course, I am perfectly aware that Roth might well be more “with” Kepesh than I think he is—that aging and death are such hopeless propositions that they justify any gratification along the road. Anyway, the moralist reading is there, and the existence of the above-named trilogy remains my best reason for thinking it is the right one. A further hunch: if Roth were genuinely “with” David Kepesh he would have called him Nathan Zuckerman. />
  “Can you imagine old age? Of course you can’t.” Actually I can, now. One of the eternal limitations of literature is its failure to prepare you for what you haven’t experienced. The best pages of The Dying Animal prepare you, and I will continue to depend on Roth’s miraculous energy. Such intimidating illumination can only be greeted equivocally, with something like—No thanks, but thanks.

  Talk 2001

  John Updike’s Farewell Notes

  John Updike My Father’s Tears and Other Stories

  The following wedge of prose has two things wrong with it: one big thing and one little thing—one infelicity and one howler. Read it with attention. If you can spot both, then you have what is called a literary ear.

  Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialized all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.

  The minor flaw is the proximity of prior and prime. This gives us a dissonant rime riche on the first syllable; and the two words, besides, are etymological half siblings, and should never be left alone together without many intercessionary chaperones. And the major flaw? The first sentence ends with the words his land; and so, with a resonant clunk, does the second. Mere quibbles, some may say. But we are addressing ourselves to John Updike, who was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Nabokov—who, in his turn, was perhaps the greatest virtuoso stylist since Joyce.

  So, the portrait of the artist as an old man: this is a murky and glutinous vista (and one of increasingly urgent interest to the present reviewer, who is closing in on sixty). My broad impression is that writers, as they age, lose energy (inspiration, musicality, imagistic serendipity) but gain in craft (the knack of knowing what goes where). Medical science has granted us a new phenomenon: the octogenarian novel. And one thinks, with respect, of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein and Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest; yet no one would seriously compare these books to Humboldt’s Gift and Harlot’s Ghost. Updike was seventy-six when he died. And for many years he suffered from partial deafness. I don’t know (perhaps nobody knows) whether the two afflictions are connected, but the fact is that Updike, in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, is in the process of losing his ear.

  This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive. In the last three decades I have published about fifteen thousand words of more or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains immortal. The most astonishing page in the new collection is the one headed “Also by John Updike”: sixty-one volumes, many of them enormously long. His productivity was preternatural: it made you think of a berserk IVF pregnancy, or a physiological condition (pressure on the cortex?), or—more realistically, given his Depression-shadowed childhood—a Protestant work ethic taken to the point of outright fanaticism. My Father’s Tears is Updike’s last book, and perhaps his least distinguished. But it ends, all the same, with the glimmer, the thwarted promise, of a happier ending.

  Readers must now prepare themselves for quotation, and a blizzard of false quantities—by which I mean those rhymes and chimes and inadvertent repetitions, those toe stubs, those excrescences and asperities that all writers hope to expunge from their work (or at least radically minimize: you never get them all). Updike’s prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike’s sentences in a spirit of stunned admiration. Here, too often, you reread them wondering (a) what they mean, or (b) why they’re there, or (c) how they survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof checking without causing a spasm of horrified self-correction.

  Consider:

  ants make mounds like coffee grounds…

  polished bright by sliding anthracite…

  my bride became allied in my mind…

  except for her bust, abruptly outthrust…

  This quatrain is not an example of Updike’s light verse; the lines consist of four separate examples of wantonly careless prose. Similarly: “alone on a lonely afternoon,” “Lee’s way of getting away from her,” “his rough-and-tumble, roughly equal matches with women,” and “a soft round arm wrapped around her face.” One sentence contains “walking” and “sidewalk”; another contains “knowing” and “knew”; another contains “year,” “yearbook,” and “year.”

  “For what is more intimate even than sex but death?” Well, you know what he means (after a moment or two), but shouldn’t that “but” be another “than” (which, I agree, wouldn’t be any good either). “Fleischer had attained, in private, to licking her feet.” Attained? And we surely don’t need to be told that Fleischer isn’t licking her feet in public. Or take this (from the title story) as an example of a sentence that audibly whimpers for a return to the drawing board:

  He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I.

  This isn’t much of a realization; and by the time you get to the repeated “than I,” the one-letter first-person pronoun (which chimes with “realized” and “mine” and “tried” and “smile”) is as hypnotically conspicuous as, say, “antidisestablishmentarianism.” Let us end these painful quotes with what may be the most indolent period ever committed to paper by a major pen (and one so easy to fix: change the first “fall” to the Englishism “autumn,” or, if that’s too onerous, change the second “fall” to “drop”): “The grapes make a mess on the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall.” The most ridiculous thing about this sentence, somehow, is its stately semicolon.

  * * *

  *

  Considered as mere narratives, the stories are as quietly inconclusive as Updike’s stories usually are; but now, denuded of a vibrant verbal surface, they sometimes seem to be neither here nor there—products of nothing more than professional habit. Then, too, you notice a loss of organizational control and, in one case, a loss of any sense of propriety. This is “Varieties of Religious Experience,” which concerns itself with September 11. First we get a strongish eyewitness account of the falling towers; then Mohammed Atta ordering his fourth scotch in a Floridan go-go bar; then an executive in the North Tower minutes after impact; then United 93 and the passengers’ (weirdly telescoped) revolt. This story appeared in November 2002: fatally premature, and fatally unearned. Death, elsewhere appropriately seen as infinitely mysterious, august, and royal—as “the distinguished thing,” in Henry James’s last words—is treated here without decorum and without taste.

  I said earlier that My Father’s Tears contains the rumor of a happier ending. These stories are presented in chronological order, and after a while the reader feels a disquieting suspense. How far will the degeneration advance? Will the last few pages be unadorned gibberish? This doesn’t happen; and the lost trust in the author begins to be partly restored. The prose takes on solidity and balance; Updike, here, is attempting less, and successfully evokes the “inner dwindling,” the ever-narrower horizon imposed by time. This perhaps would have been Updike’s very last phase. And the reader closes the book with a restive sadness that death has deprived us of it.

  “The Full Glass,” the final story, seems to me to be quietly innovative, like the ending of “The Walk with Elizanne” (where the literary imagination boldly rescues a failing memory). V. S. Pritchett, on his ninetieth birthday, said to me in an interview:

  As one gets older one becomes very boring and long-winded to oneself. One’s thoughts are long-winded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel….Travelling through minds and situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel.

  I suggest without irony that Updike’s last challenge might have been to turn long-windedness into art—and to make boredom interesting.

  Age waters the writer down. The most terrible fate of all is
to lose the ability to impart life to your creations (your creations, in other words, are dead on arrival). Other novelists simply fall out of love with the reader; this was true of James, and also of Joyce (who never much cared for the reader in the first place: what he cared for was words). Not so with Updike, even in these loose and straitened pages. As you might see on a signpost in his beloved American countryside (while approaching some stoical little township), the stories here are “Thickly Settled.” Updike’s creations live, and authorial love is what sustains them. He put it very plainly in his memoir, Self-Consciousness: “Imitation is praise. Description expresses love.” That love, at least, never began to weaken.

  The Guardian 2009

  Rabbit Angstrom Confronts Obamacare

  America is sick about health: America, where strokes and heart attacks come with a price tag, and where the doctors carry on like slum landlords or war profiteers. And Americans admire it—this triage of the wallet.

  John Updike, or John Updike’s ghost, would be interested (but not surprised) to learn that the year of his death saw a kind of grass-roots rebellion against the health-care system favored by the current administration: Obamacare—the first step toward a system long-established in every other country in the First World. Americans believe in decentralized authority, individual choice, and what they call “fiscal responsibility” (or very low taxes); they dislike the “nanny state,” which, scandalously, coddles the apathetic citizen “from cradle to grave.” Americans pay for their coming hither and for their going hence—costly entrances, truly exorbitant exits. It is the American way, and they’re wedded to it.