Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Thomas ordered a glass of wine and a dozen oysters and sat back to collect his thoughts. But he was unable to gather them coherently so he contented himself watching the show, the bar arguments and laughter and the young lovers at the corner table who were making plans for the evening. His attention was noticed because the young woman caught Thomas’s eye and winked; he tipped a glass in her direction. The patron continued to pull the porcelain handles, glass after glass.

  Yet an American cozy in Paris is still an alien, and Forgetfulness strikes the theme of aliens early and often. The pain in Florette’s leg is “migrating, an unwelcome undocumented alien.” She is an alien in the realm of the mountain gods, who are “especially vengeful toward women who invaded their domain, careless uninvited intruders who did not know their rightful place in the world.” The leader of her halfhearted rescuers, with his soft, coarse voice, reminds her of her crazily brutal father, of whom her mother explained, “He is an alien.” North Africans in Europe, Hispanics in Thomas’s once German-dominated hometown of LaBarre, Wisconsin, Slovenian bears imported to replace the extinct bears of the Pyrenees, solitary Englishmen in remotest France, like Thomas’s 106-year-old neighbor St. John Granger—all are aliens. St. John Granger’s great-niece, come from Pennsylvania to collect her inheritance, says to Thomas pointedly, “I have never understood people who choose to live outside their own country. Why is it important to them to live among strangers, speaking a foreign tongue, eternally on the outside of things. Who do they think they’re kidding? It’s like trying to escape your own shadow, except every time you look over your shoulder it’s there.” Thomas (whose career in portraiture specializes in strangers: “Strangers were his métier, fifteen minutes’ acquaintance and a series of snapshots all he required”) spends the novel looking over the shoulder at his past, with substantial doses of alcohol to clarify the view.

  Forgetfulness is a portrait of loss and grief, as not only does Thomas’s wife disappear but his two boyhood buddies from LaBarre, Russ Conlon and Bernhard Sindelar, cease to be vital presences in his life. He drifts irresolutely to America, where he rents a small house on a Maine island attached to the mainland by an irregular ferry. When Bernhard visits him, it is as an alien from a distasteful world of hugger-mugger: he has become the managing director of a security firm that supplies “ex–Special Forces, ex-SAS, ex–Foreign Legion, ex-Wehrmacht, ex-cops, ex–Chicago goons, Los Angeles shamuses” to whoever can pay for them. Bernhard and Russ both, after college, were recruited by the government for overseas intelligence work, as NOCs, under “non-official cover.” From their feast of clandestine activity, they sometimes let fall crumbs, “odd jobs”—“the small change of snooping”—in Thomas’s way; the roving painter found the work congenial, “the technique similar to portraiture, slipping into an alter ego,” but the enchantment has long worn off. To Bernhard, espionage work was “coherence,” a calling; “only chaos was inadmissible.” While still in government service, he availed himself of French contacts to locate the four men who carried Florette halfway down Big Papa, and he invites Thomas to witness their interrogation in Le Havre. Here the reader, looking with the painter through the two-way mirror, becomes an alien, in the unfamiliar world of officially condoned torture, the vigorously applied leather bastinado and the cruelly languid inquisition:

  So, the Frenchman repeated, his voice light, almost cheerful. He turned his head to look at the clock … and Thomas noticed that it read five. The Frenchman looked at it for a minute or more, giving the impression that time was infinite.… Now he lowered his eyes to the file and began to read once again, except his posture was confidential, an attitude approaching intimacy. He had put his foot on the chair, leaning forward with the file in his thick hands, wetting his thumb again and again as he turned the mysterious pages.

  Mysterious also is the liking that the inquisitor, Antoine, takes to surly Thomas, and the permission he grants him to spend two hours alone with the head suspect, a terrorist or smuggler who at last confirms, from his own angle, what we have already seen from Florette’s. After this anticlimax of a climactic encounter, the novel and its hero’s actions subside into incoherence: “He had lost the rhyme and melody of feelings.… Thomas believed he had made a mistake in Le Havre but he didn’t know what it was. He imagined the mistake was some form of Lebenslüge. But what was the lie that allowed him to live? He wondered if the lie was his refusal to have blood on his hands. So the interrogation at Le Havre, too, was unresolved and marked by doubt.”

  Numerous threads are tugged—Thomas drinks more and has taken up smoking again; his doctor warns him he is headed for heart trouble; he walks the two miles from the village to his home in a cataclysmic thunderstorm and is blown into a ditch; he has farewell drinks with Granger’s pro-Bush heir and her cell-phone-addicted husband, who have sold the house; he returns to America for the first time in ten years; he visits LaBarre, finds his family’s house and everyone he knew gone, and is advised to get out of town; he spends time in New York with Russ, who has turned to writing short stories—but none of these threads pull Just’s wide weave of incident and rumination tight. There are reverberant, dead-on patches of writing—the interrogation; the thunderstorm; riffs on billiards and churches and old jazz records and Billie Holiday; Thomas’s memories of small-town life and of his father, a chain-smoking doctor, and of his first model and passionate lover, Karen, and his first New York show, where his churchly mother met Karen nude on canvas and in the tipsy flesh—but what Thomas makes of his retrospect and intends to do with the rest of his life is left in the Maine fog. The reader at this point could use a little of le Carré’s well-crafted intricacy and tidy professional closure. Ward Just and his hero just fade away, somewhat like the Washington masters of hugger-mugger when jargon-prone Bernhard returns for a conference, “a general review of current operations with special attention to methods and sources, connecting dots while they walked back the cat, a dispirited and dispiriting exercise. Morale was terrible, the fudge factory’s bureaucracy nervously broken down without energy enough for rebellion. Congress was asniff, the Pentagon frightened, and the White House in deep prayer.” Well, such is life when hugger-mugger palls.

  Classics Galore

  TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS, by Jane Smiley. 449 pp. Knopf, 2007.

  Jane Smiley’s capacious new novel does not give the reader a warm welcome—the first chapter is cloying and confusing—but accommodates him amply enough so that at the end, 450 pages later, he is reluctant to leave. The ten chapters are named for ten successive days; the first, “DAY ONE • Monday, March 24, 2003,” comes five days after the U.S.-led coalition initiated the second Gulf War. More than seven thousand miles from Baghdad, in Pacific Palisades, California, within sight of the Getty Center shining on its hill, a woman simply called Elena awakes, full of memories of last night’s Academy Awards ceremony, which she attended with her lover, Max, a well-known, if recently idle, director whose name is Nathan Maxwell, Anglicized (it is thought) from Milstein. She is fifty, he is fifty-eight. They met “in the cheese section at Gelson’s last Easter, when Max was buying a Piave and Elena was buying a Gruyère de Comté and their hands touched as they both reached for the Époisses.” They are still reaching for happiness together, and the reader is thrust into the middle of their mutual fascination. Max expresses the desire to make a movie, on the model of My Dinner with André, called My Lovemaking with Elena. She contemplates his penis, fondly dubbed the Big Classic after they searched for its match in a dildo shop: “It lay over to the side, not a straight, evenly shaped sausage, but more of a baguette, bulging comfortably in the middle and then narrowing just below the cap.” Physical facts and sensations are not stinted in the novel; as in My Dinner with André, there is no apparent hurry. He kisses her:

  The sensation of his lips on hers flowered along her cranial nerves, which she imagined fanning outward from her lips over and around her head like a spiderweb, and within that web was a darkness whose life she could better s
ense when her eyes were closed. When her eyes were open, she was all surface, facing the world. When her eyes were closed, she was all hollow, facing inward.

  Similarly biform, each chapter is roughly half talk and half sex. The sexual descriptions set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent. Smiley works in close focus, and from a male as well as a female point of view. A differently placed kiss:

  He kissed her again, and then pulled her labia into his mouth and ran his tongue over them. He could feel her clitoris begin to touch his upper lip.… Suddenly she shivered and cried out, and the aroma of her sex mushroomed around him, tangy and rich and erotic. “Ah ah ah ah ooh!” she said, and a moment later pushed his head away.

  The talk, when the characters come up for air, ranges widely but keeps reverting to the Iraq war and the movie business. The acknowledgments at the book’s end thank “every director and commentator on every DVD who bothered to add ‘Special Features,’ ” and there can be no doubt that Smiley, whose previous novels have abundantly shared information on farming, horses, real estate, and medieval Scandinavian settlements in Greenland, has done her DVD research with characteristic thoroughness. Movies—classic and obscure, real and imaginary—pepper the conversation as Max’s house suddenly fills up with guests. Realizing that his lovemaking with Elena this morning will be, thanks to the Big Classic’s curious lack of coöperation, all foreplay, he ventures to the bathroom and reports, “The house is full of people.” “How many people?” Elena asks. “Do we know them?” He answers, “Stoney, Charlie, Delphine, Cassie, Isabel, and Simon.” Two more guests, the actress and singer Zoe Cunningham and her lover and guru, Paul Schmidt, show up and invite themselves to stay, which brings to a tidy ten the cast of this modern-day Decameron.

  Of the ten, Max is a reputable director, Zoe a famous star, and Stoney Whipple an agent, the relatively laid-back son of the legendary, recently deceased agent Jerry Whipple, born Hillel Goldman. The others are linked by kinship or friendship to these workers in the film industry: Delphine is Zoe’s mother; Cassie Marshall, “notoriously well connected,” runs an art gallery and is Delphine’s best friend; Simon McCracken is Elena’s twenty-year-old son by a former conjunction; Isabel is Max and Zoe’s twenty-three-year-old daughter by their previous marriage to each other. Charlie Mannheim, the least Hollywood-flavored of the lot, has been Max’s buddy since they were boys in New Jersey. He still lives in New Jersey, though he no longer works for the Pepsi-Cola corporation, and is separated from his wife, who bore him five children. The group has some ethnic diversity: Elena is a Midwesterner of Scandinavian blood, and Delphine a black Jamaican, which makes Zoe and Isabel, though both had white fathers, women of color. Isabel, as it happens, has been surreptitiously sleeping with Stoney since she was sixteen, and Paul, in a coincidence that doesn’t go anywhere, was bullied as a child by Max, who doesn’t recognize him behind his luxuriant guru’s beard.

  In their ten days of living together, the ten characters generate more chatter than drama. Simon impulsively, meaning no harm, punches Paul and knocks him off a kitchen barstool. Zoe, again impulsively, sleeps with Simon; when she blithely confesses to a displeased Paul, he asks, in good therapeutic manner, “Does that seem to you to have been appropriate?” She answers, “I don’t know. It was fun. He’s nice. I realize he punched you, but I’d sort of forgotten about that by the late afternoon.” Charlie, feeling out of place, supports the Administration’s position on Iraq and watches Isabel and Stoney copulate beside a swimming pool, then joins them in conversation about his pills (twenty-one a day), the herbal cure for his high PSA, and his negative take on Isabel’s mother’s hairy new lover. Some of this behavior teeters on the edge of the acceptable, but Smiley has put herself on the edge of acceptable novel-writing, replacing plot and suspense with something freer and more lifelike—casual talk, generally inconsequential but creating a lattice of cross-purpose in which emotions and attractions extend their tendrils.

  When, in the seventh chapter, the house party moves, entire, higher into the hills, to a preposterously palatial Bel Air mansion being remodelled by a Russian plutocrat called Mike, who wants Max to make a movie of Gogol’s violent, somewhat anti-Semitic historical tale Taras Bulba, things get a bit more eventful: children and parents have it out; lovers part or confirm their unions; and the mansion’s two maids, Russians named Monique and Marya, interact with the guests. The funniest, most outrageous, and most revelatory sex scene occurs when Monique, a thirty-three-year-old beauty, emerges from a secret corridor into Charlie’s bedroom. Bored with her life in the uncompleted palace, she has sized up the ten strangers and “thought I might find some entertainment among you.” Also, Charlie patted her derrière while she was serving dinner, and in revenge she playfully spanks him. Fussy about his sleep, obsessed with his many medications, he grumpily resists her impudent provocations, declining an invitation to spank her in turn. When she tells him that, in her view, “most Americans are narrow-minded, ignorant, and provincial,” he feels his face go red, and she quickly says, “So now are you ready to spank me? I have insulted your country; Americans hate that sort of thing.” Monique is of a type rather new to American fiction’s provinces, a post-Communist Russian, saucily enriching the free world with her native energy and bluntness. Finding hypochondriacal Charlie unresponsive, she demonstrates the successful use of a vibrator and admits to adoring her fellow-maid Marya’s breasts:

  “Just today, while you in the dining room were eating your main course, we went into the pantry while Raphael wasn’t looking, and I opened her shirt, which has snaps, you see, and then her bra, which has a front hook, and I sucked her tits like mad and also squatted down and brought myself. That’s why we were a little late picking up the plates. I didn’t even have time to wash my hands.…”

  So much blithe sluttiness does at last excite the aging American, yet when he consummates his arousal in her body she sulks, saying, “I think penetration is going a little far.” Charlie replies with American pragmatism, “There’s nothing you can do about it now.” Monique admits, “Your attitude seems quite strange to me.” The twists of libido are wound into a cultural exchange, and the anatomy of our inward hollows is illuminated to surprising and comic effect.

  Male arousal (not female, which seems to be pretty constant) is a main theme. Max’s impotence on Day One has something to do with the Iraq war and Elena’s furious, irrepressibly vocal dislike of it: “She had been wondering whether it was time to make that behavioral connection—war–angry woman–impotence—that would show that the failure was her fault.” His potency revives (“It felt like he was entering her up to her throat, that’s how big he was”) on Day Nine, with the stimulus of a video camera handheld by her. The camera is symbolic, perhaps, of the return of his creative vocation. He is turned on, after much sensible reluctance, by the prospect of directing a remake of Taras Bulba; a previous film version came out in 1962, starring Yul Brynner.

  * * *

  The Iraq war, in its opening and apparently triumphant weeks, is analogous to the Black Death, which forms the background of The Decameron. Having evoked the full horror of the collapse of civil order in fourteenth-century Florence, Boccaccio conjures up an idyll of civilized society in the nearby countryside. His ten refugees from the city—seven women and three men (unlike the five and five of Ten Days in the Hills, and with no overt sexual interaction)—establish a model of decorous mutual entertainment, ten stories each for ten days, each day ruled by a rotating moderator, a “king” or a “queen.” With the aid of servants conveniently brought along, all is delight and abundance and beauty, though some of the narratives are cruel and bawdy. Smiley’s brief essay on The Decameron in her previous book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), couldn’t be more admiring:

  The ten young people form a perfect comic society, surrounded by beauty and abundance that they can fully appreciate.… The treasury of detail in The Decameron defies analysis, or even sufficient appreciation. T
he reader … can only appreciate each brilliant turn of phrase or each exquisite irony or each perfect set piece and then move on to the next, allowing them, afterward, to coexist imperfectly but delightfully in the memory, until her enjoyment is renewed with another reading.

  Ten Days in the Hills, unable to subdue its modern matter to a late-medieval courtliness and formality, strives for, and to an impressive extent achieves, a kindred richness. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a lavish trove of sharp perceptions and firm opinions, includes the author’s vision of her next novel—that is, the present one, foreseen as “spherical and self-contained, but jammed with things, like a spaceship made of Venetian glass, shining, intricate, and full of colors.” The novel’s pampered, restless Hollywood types, sheltered in two luxurious houses, the second of which is shot through with Byzantine fantasy, regale one another with stories from their lives, or found in the newspapers, and end each day, as people do in Hollywood, with a privately screened movie. Art of a sort is always on their minds, and their conversation and copulation possess, against the background of a distant tactical war, the benign glow of peaceful activity.

  Smiley’s introduction to Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel contains some abruptly confessional sentences. She tells us that in 2001, when she turned fifty-two and the World Trade Center was destroyed, she became stuck two-thirds of the way through a novel called Good Faith. Her dutiful, efficient life—“no drinking, no drugs, personal modesty and charm, good behavior on as many fronts as I could manage, a public life of agreeability and professionalism”—foundered on fear, “fear of anthrax, fear of nuclear terrorism, fear of flying, fear of the future.” At the same time, her “lover and partner” was diagnosed with heart disease and underwent some procedures that made her fear that she “would be bereft of his physical presence,” a gingerly phrasing that hints at religious belief: “I tried to remind myself of the illusory nature of the world and my conviction that death is a transition, not an end, to discipline my fears.”