Views, Reviews and Ruminations

FIFTEEN YEARS have seen John Updike create a woodlands mythology out of the manicured green of suburbia, an imitation rather than a statement of what it has been like to be alive in America. Rabbit Run, The Centaur, Rabbit Redux are labors of domestic love, and if sometimes Updike resembles that tranquil genre of English novel, it is out of a modesty as to the possibilities of writing, a concern for the world as it is, and a desire to leave it untrammeled by authorial intrusion.

This collection of assorted prose is a rather judicious picking-up of views and reviews, ruminations and commentary of all sorts, some speeches, an interview, a parody, and several miscellaneous vignettes. In contrast to the cover's jacket, which leads us to expect a kind of epistemological A to Z--everything "from Brazilian Indian legends and turkish sultans to symbiosis and suicide"--Updike's interests are literary. As is generally the case with reviews and criticism, it is not so much who or what is being reviewed that we read, but Updike himself.

The candor of straightforward literary comment gives us an idea of Updike the individual, the person we can only glimpse in his fiction. His speeches and interviews, full of personal admissions and anecdotes of past experiences, offer an even more personal composite of the man and his interests. Of course, this can be good or bad, depending primarily on whether you find a writer's background interesting. But the Updike admirer will be delighted, feeling instantly a companion to his sympathies, and discovering again the compassionate intelligence that sprung Rabbit, Chiron and others on us as sylvan metaphors for American life.

Picked-Up Pieces is to date the most thorough compendium of what Updike thinks of writing, and how he feels himself a writer. In a speech "Why Write?" he observes,

...(the writer's activity is rather curiously private and finicking, a matter of exorcism and manufacture rather than a toplofty proclamation; that what he makes is ideally as ambiguous and opaque as life itself; that, to be blunt, the social usefulness of writing matters to him primarily in that it somehow creates a few job opportunities...

and later,

Writing, really, can make us do rather few substantial things: it can make us laugh, it can make us weep, and if it is pornography and we are young, it can make us come. It can also, of course, make us sleep; and though in the frequent discussion of the writer's social purpose this soporific effect is unfailingly ignored, I suspect it is the most widespread practical effect of writing...

Updike's vision is a modest one, humorously self-tolerant, seeing in the writer's work a way of life which, if no longer world-jarring, is at least meaningful to himself and a few others. The heyday of the Victorian novel is past; the effort to capture the rush of perishable existence died with Joyce and Lawrence; the author-as-hero is gone with Camus and Hemingway; and in their place is now the professional writer, making a living like anyone else. This is a truthful image because, as Updike remarks in "One Big Interview," our age is a sedate one,

In general, the North American continent in this century has been a place where catastrophe has held off...If, as may be, the holocausts at the rim of possibility do soon visit us, I am confident my capacities for expression can rise, if I live, to the occasion.

AS A CRITIC, Updike displays the same tolerant eye for people which marks his fiction; the reviewer is not in conflict with the poet and novelist in him. His pieces, the majority of which have appeared in The New Yorker, are not pedantic and their appeal is expansive. His topics range from Borges's stoicism, Kierkegaard's tormented religiousity, Grass's flippant cynicism, to subjects of a more light-hearted tone, as for example in his piece called "Jong Love,"

Erica Jong's first novel feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her souffle rises with a poet's afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-lettered words as if women had invented them...

Updike, like us all, has his pet bemusements. The most obvious and protracted is sexuality ("the monstrous and gummy organs of sex, which look like wounds"), with particular respect to women,

Mademoiselle: What is female sexuality?

--You ask me about this most wordless of subjects. I know nothing; but the "nothing" stirs, breathes, takes on a vague and vaguely-inviting form...

Another is his undergraduate stay at Harvard, which he treats in a benignly mocking tone,

My time at Harvard, once I got by the compression bends of freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting around to make him a butterfly...

In his "Introduction to The Harvard Lampoon Centennial Celebration 1876-1973" (he was Lampoon president in former days), there is a hilarious description of that organization, where he reminds us aptly that "The Lampoon is saved from mere sociable fatuity by being also The Lampoon, a magazine."

INTERESTING AND AMUSING as this sort of anthology can be, there is in the end a feeling of dissatisfaction. You suspect that it is more a creation of the publisher than the author. A potpourri of reviews whose topics are unfamiliar, of speeches never heard, can become repetitive. There is no overall conception, no theme, no characterization, so that the reader is deprived of the interest which comes when a book is creatively unified. Writing in The New Yorker pampers the trite, and even a writer as versatile as Updike often caters to a readership which can interest itself in such a well-written frivolity as "Coffee-Table Books for High Coffee-Tables." Picked-Up Pieces is good bedside reading, and if it can make you laugh, it can also have the very practical effect of putting you asleep.