by Begley, Adam
THERE WAS PLENTY of magic in Brazil (1994), but not the right sort, at least according to the critics. Two years later came In the Beauty of the Lilies, which was much more favorably reviewed. Of the novels he wrote in the nineties, it’s easily the most ambitious, and in some ways just as adventurous and daring as his rash excursion into South American fantasy. His second-longest and most expansive novel, Lilies tracks four generations of the Wilmot family across the twentieth century and across the continent, from New Jersey to Hollywood to Colorado, where a climactic conflagration closes out the narrative. The story begins in 1910 with a nugget of Updike family history, a reimagined version of a seminal crisis: his grandfather Hartley’s loss of faith. This was material Updike had first begun to research for the genealogical chapter of Self-Consciousness, but here he succeeds where elsewhere he had repeatedly failed: at last he managed to write straight historical fiction that satisfied him intellectually and aesthetically. Relocating the Updike saga from Trenton to Paterson, he juxtaposed a Presbyterian minister’s apostasy with the making of a motion picture (D. W. Griffith’s The Call to Arms, starring Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford) and the doomed 1913 Paterson silk strike—a dose of theology, film, and history that establishes the thematic parameters of the novel.
The granddaughter of the lapsed clergyman becomes a world-famous movie star. Although she achieves her apotheosis in Hollywood as Alma DeMott, she was raised as Essie Wilmot in a “sweet small town” very much like Shillington, her childhood an idealized recapitulation of Updike’s own. Essie is the twin sister he never had, another stutterer, cherished and self-cherishing, reveling in the joy of being herself, protected by an innocently solipsistic religious faith, and most ecstatic in the dark at the Roxie, the town’s movie house. Her parents, unlike his, are as loving with each other as they are with their daughter, and that added comfort, which makes her doubly secure in “her power, her irresistible fire,” does nothing to blunt her urge to escape, to make the successive leaps from young beauty pageant contestant to starlet to celluloid goddess. She becomes a celebrity in a way that no writer ever does, but her ambition and the fulfillment of that ambition are analogous to what Updike experienced in his flight from Shillington to Harvard and beyond. This was the first time he had poured so much of himself into a woman’s body, and the result, especially as Essie is growing up, is a thoroughly convincing portrait of a sympathetic character with humanizing flaws. Her narcissism hardens in adulthood, starkly exposed by her failings as a mother and her radically self-serving theology. On her climb to the pinnacle of fame, Alma plays opposite Bing Crosby in a musical comedy, and recognizes in her costar an “inhuman efficiency”: “She observed in him what she already sensed in herself, the danger of becoming a performer purely, of coming alive in proportion to the size of the audience, and being absent-minded and remote when the audience was small”—a trait Updike, too, would have recognized.
Alma’s only child, the sorely neglected Clark (after Gable), drifts until he falls under the spell of a charismatic preacher, the self-appointed messiah of a Colorado religious commune. After several years at the Temple of True and Actual Faith, Clark earns the fifteen minutes of fame he never sought. Escalating friction with the local authorities leads to a Waco-style debacle, complete with helicopters, armored vehicles, swarming FBI and ATF agents, tear gas canisters, and the imminent threat of collective immolation—all avidly filmed by the television networks for the evening news. On impulse, perhaps assisted by divine revelation, perhaps conditioned by Hollywood cliché, Clark plays the hero.
The extreme violence at the end of Lilies is unlike anything in Updike’s fiction. The shooting goes on for eight pages, the only sustained scene of mayhem he ever attempted, and, except for the murder-suicide in Witches, the only fatal violence of any kind that isn’t distanced by an exotic setting (as in The Coup and Brazil, both of them, like Witches, rife with extravagant make-believe). The realist novels and stories Updike set in America are almost entirely devoid of even the threat of violence, but here, in the context of a military-style assault, we’re caught in the cross fire of a protracted gunfight with multiple victims and the kind of gore usually associated with splatter porn. We see a woman shot from close range, her head “spouting blood . . . the hole spurting like a water bubbler, pulse after pulse until it quickly dribbled down to an ebbing red nub.”
Published only eighteen months after Lilies, his next novel was fittingly postapocalyptic: Toward the End of Time is set in the year 2020, after a nuclear war with China has devastated large tracts of a now-defunct United States of America. Industrial pollution has given rise to “metallobioforms,” a plague of deadly inorganic pests proliferating on the “blasted, depopulated planet.” In the skies, new objects have appeared, including an abandoned space station and a mysterious “halo of iridescence,” a vast torus that floats beyond the clouds. And the narrative itself forks at times, making “quantum leaps of plot and personality,” taking us to places far away and long ago, parallel universes briefly illuminated. But these sci-fi embellishments are peripheral to the central drama, which is recorded in a year’s worth of journal entries kept by a retired investment adviser named Ben Turnbull. That drama is nothing more exotic than Ben’s panicky fear of growing old and dying. Oates, reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, described Ben as “morbidly narcissistic,” and indeed, in the midst of planetary disaster, he recites with raging egotism complaints about his deteriorating health and the impotence, literal and figurative, of the elderly. (At sixty-six he seems far older.)
In the Beauty of the Lilies was in many respects a thoroughly conventional novel, but writing it pushed Updike into new territory. Conversely, the wildly unconventional Toward the End of Time hardly required him to step out the door. The social chaos implied by the postapocalyptic, “post-law-and-order” environment is little more than a rumor for Ben; he and his neighbors in Haskells Crossing, an affluent seaside community north of Boston, find their privileged lives largely undisturbed: “I am safe,” he says, “in my nest of local conditions, on my hilltop in sight of the still-unevaporated ocean.” Ben’s lofty white mansion with its majestic saltwater view is a portrait of Haven Hill, faithful to the last detail. The best passages in the book lavish attention on the flora and fauna of the eleven acres of grounds around the house: the garden beds, the driveway winding down through the woods to the mailbox, the pond.
Updike was uncharacteristically nervous about the similarities between his life in Beverly Farms and Ben’s in Haskells Crossing. For the first time since the publication of Couples, he went out of his way to distance himself from his fiction. Declaring forcefully that autobiography is “one of the dullest genres,” he stressed the “considerable trouble of invention” that went into the making of his narrator. He stooped to listing comically trivial differences between Ben and himself: “He comes from the Massachusetts Berkshires and not from Pennsylvania’s Berks County. He has more children and grandchildren than I.” (Ben’s five children from his first marriage have given him eleven grandchildren, two of whom have a Togolese father.) Updike’s odd and oddly ineffective attempt to disavow the obvious autobiographical basis of the novel has in all probability nothing to do with the fact that Ben is distinctly unappealing, mostly because of his sexual rapacity. If you’ve already foisted on your readers characters as abrasive as Tom Marshfield and Roger Lambert, presenting them with the nasty, lecherous, and self-pitying Ben Turnbull scarcely seems an occasion for awkward disclaimers.
Updike was more likely worried about the portrait of Ben’s second wife, the crisp and forbidding Gloria, a fanatic gardener and fearsome nag, five years younger than he and exasperated with his doddery behavior. She is, if possible, less appealing than her husband. According to Ben, “Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence on her own concept of world order mark her impress on the world.” The novel begins with her crusade against the doe that eats her tulip shoots and euonymus hedge. She wants the deer killed—and
Ben narcissistically translates this as a murderous impulse aimed at him: “In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead, she took an overactive interest in my health, from vitamin pills laid out beside my morning orange juice to a constant nagging about what I put in my mouth.” With her ice-blue eyes, perfect smile, and crown of ash-blond hair, Gloria, in his estimation, is a “soigné vulture” eagerly awaiting his demise and her rich widow’s reward: “well-heeled freedom.”
Martha’s comments on the manuscript suggest that if she recognized herself in this caricature of a shrewish, controlling wife, she wasn’t going to let on.* Most of her notes dealt with horticultural issues (correcting details such as the proper time of year to prune clematis), but she did permit herself to question the passage where Ben crows about having had sex with three different women in one day—this when he was married to his first wife (the suggestively named Perdita) and immersed in “suburban polygamy.” Martha wrote:
Well, it’s your call, but you already told us, the Readers, in a previous novel, about the time you fucked 3 women in 1 day. It’s boasting too much, perhaps?
Updike let the passage stand.
Martha bravely proclaimed the book a delight to read, a verdict even its most generous supporters would have hesitated to endorse. Toward the End of Time summoned more bile from critics than any previous Updike novel, and it was the last, with the possible exception of the 9/11-inspired Terrorist (2006), to spark much controversy. Decidedly mixed reviews greeted the remaining four novels: Gertrude and Claudius (2000), a nimbly entertaining prequel to Hamlet; Seek My Face (2002), a guided tour of the New York art scene courtesy of the leading female abstract expressionist, now seventy-eight and raging, like Ben Turnbull, against the indignities of old age; Villages (2004), a doggedly autobiographical retelling of Updike’s progress from Shillington (renamed Willow, in honor of the novel he attempted sophomore year at Harvard) to Beverly Farms (Haskells Crossing again), complete with the two wives, both scantily disguised; and The Widows of Eastwick (2008), a downbeat, valedictory sequel. Only Gertrude and Claudius, clever and engaging (yet slight), stirred any real enthusiasm. On the whole, the novels of Updike’s last decade were more likely to be met with polite indifference than hostility. He was by now a landmark on the literary landscape so familiar and venerated that even a spiteful reviewer felt obliged either to salute his cumulative achievement or to regret that after a lifetime of acclaim he no longer measured up. His oeuvre could be a liability; as he pointed out, “Among the rivals besetting an aging writer is his younger, nimbler self, when he was the cocky new thing.”
XI.
The Lonely Fort
[I]t doesn’t do to think overmuch about prizes, does it? Being a writer at all is the prize.
—Updike to Oates, 2006
In the fall of 1997, Updike’s literary reputation was buffeted in rapid succession by Michiko Kakutani, the most prominent reviewer in America, and by a relative youngster, David Foster Wallace, who exploded onto the scene a year earlier with his gargantuan second novel, Infinite Jest. Kakutani dismissed Toward the End of Time as “particularly sour, ugly and haphazardly constructed”; she wondered how such a gifted writer could produce such a “lousy” novel. Wallace was even more scathing: “It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.” Updike was spared immediate pain from this one-two combination. He’d learned to shrug off the “irrepressible Michiko”; he told a friend that since he had seen her “blow her top” so often, it was hard to take her seriously. The Times, as if to compensate for Kakutani, ran in its Sunday books section a breezy, enthusiastic endorsement from Margaret Atwood: “As memento mori and its obverse, carpe diem, Toward the End of Time could scarcely be bettered.” As for Wallace’s review, he didn’t read it until years later.
The thirty-five-year-old Wallace presented himself as the spokesman for a new generation. “The fact is,” he confided, “that I am probably classifiable as one of very few actual sub-40 Updike fans.” He claimed to have discovered, among (female) friends of his age, a range of unflattering opinions on Updike, including “Just a penis with a thesaurus” and “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” and the familiar accusation of misogyny. Worse, he announced with calm conviction that Updike, Roth, and Mailer, “the three Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated American postwar fiction,” were now in their “senescence”—a verdict so perfectly tailored to Updike’s insecurities that it seemed sadistic. Wallace complained that Updike’s prose, his “great strength for almost forty years,” had deteriorated to the point where it seemed “less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.” (Writing about Renoir, Updike had observed, “Old artists are entitled to caricature themselves.”)
A dismaying echo of Wallace’s criticisms came wafting across the Atlantic in early 1998—dismaying because it issued from the pen of James Wood, a thirty-two-year-old Englishman regarded by many as the best literary critic of his generation. In his review of Toward the End of Time, Wood judged the novel to be “idly constructed . . . and astonishingly misogynistic.” He added, “Of course it is ‘beautifully written’ if by that one means a harmless puffy lyricism.” Zeroing in on the novel’s “puerile misogyny,” he dismissed, in this case, the argument that the author “is not identical with his misogynistic characters.” Wood saw little daylight between Updike and Ben, but stopped short of declaring that Updike actually hated women. Instead, he added his voice to the chorus of critics who objected to the sexual content of Updike’s fiction; “a lifelong distraction,” he called it. In an essay about a later collection of stories, Licks of Love (2000), Wood argued that sexual obsessions “have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute, now, the equivalent of an artist’s palette: this is how Updike chooses to paint the world.” There’s certainly plenty of evidence to support this claim: Tom Marshfield, Roger Lambert, and Ben Turnbull are all guilty of thinking of women as sex objects, worthy of attention only insofar as they are instruments of male sexual gratification; Rabbit rarely thinks any other way. A list of Updike’s priapic characters, men whose fascination with women amounts to sexual obsession, would be very long indeed. But Wood chose to ground his criticism in aesthetics rather than the politics of feminism, to keep his focus on the “artist’s palette.” He called the world Updike painted “distasteful and limited” and suggested that it needn’t be: “Misogyny can animate, and very powerfully and interestingly, as in Philip Roth’s work.” But by bringing in Roth, whose novel Sabbath’s Theater (1995) had provoked shrieks of outrage as well as hosannas, Wood drains his argument of any force. He finds Roth’s misogyny compelling and Updike’s distasteful—it’s only a matter of which palette suits the critic’s palate.
The worry for Updike was a gradually forming consensus; again and again, reviewers handed down a three- or four-part indictment that began with misogyny, then accused him of being too prolific, too fond of his own gorgeous prose, and too nostalgic (read: out of date). He’d been typecast. Wood could write, “It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book,” and be sure to elicit a knowing chuckle. His warnings about the perils of too fancy a style were themselves pretty swank: “The sentences have an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract.” Ten years earlier, praising Rabbit at Rest, he had remarked that Updike’s “plush attention to detail” amounted to “a nostalgia for the present”; now he lamented a different, more common brand of nostalgia: “If Updike’s earlier work was consumed with wife-swapping, his late work is consumed by nostalgia for it.” All this carping pointed in only one direction, Wood’s blunt verdict: “Updike is not, I think, a great writer.”*
With the new millennium looming and the criti
cal tide running against him, Updike called Henry Bech into action. In “Bech Noir,” written as the reviews of Toward the End of Time began to appear, he sent his alter ego on a killing spree. Hitting back after “a lifetime of provocation,” adopting as his motto the biblical phrase “Vengeance is mine,” Bech slays his harshest critics one by one, rubbing them out ruthlessly, just as they had ruthlessly panned his work. Spiteful to the end, one of them says with his dying breath, “Bech . . . believe me . . . your stuff . . . won’t last.” Indulging himself with a less far-fetched fantasy in “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden,” the author shipped his hero off to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature—a gesture of ramifying irony. Updike’s motives were so mixed that only fragments showed, among them the impish urge to make mischief: if his moment had passed, if, age sixty-five, he was unlikely ever to wear the laurels, why not take himself definitively out of the running with a piece of calculated effrontery? Bech, we learn, receives the Swedish prize not on merit but because certain committee members were casting protest votes. In “Bech Presides,” he’d already taken a swipe at prize committees. A fellow writer asks Bech if he ever wanted to be a literary judge:
“No,” Bech admitted. “I always duck it.”
“Me, too. So who accepts? Midgets. So who do they choose for the prize? Another midget.”
Bech detects sour grapes behind this show of bravado. Updike, too: himself the recipient of countless awards, he was careful not to belittle the beneficiaries of Sweden’s bounty, nor to let any hint of envy creep into his public remarks on new laureates. (The Italian Dario Fo won in 1997; the following year it was the turn of Portuguese novelist José Saramago, whose Baltasar and Blimunda Updike had reviewed without much enthusiasm, but politely, for The New Yorker.)
