The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  This is a tremendously expert novel. Updike, by now, is the ‘complete’ player, an all-court wrong-footing wizard who has lost none of his speed. As with Roger, the book’s cargo of disgust (disgust for the corporeal, disgust for the contemporary) is perfectly offset by the radiance of the humour, the perceptions, the epiphanies. Dale Kohler seeks the designer universe. I direct him to the fiction of John Updike. It is a very dinky place – too dinky, perhaps. I sense genius, but not the heavy impact of greatness, not yet. I feel like Roger, tiptoeing through the projects (and this is a typically nifty strophe):

  Two limber black youths were mounting the steel stairs three at a time, in utterly silent bounds. They rose towards me at great speed, in their worn stovepipe jeans, their shiny basketball jackets and huge silent jogging shoes, and passed on either side of me like headlights that turn out to be motorcycles.

  Observer October 1986

  Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike

  ‘These memoirs’, John Updike writes, ‘feel shabby … forced … [they] struggle to expose what should be – in decency, to conserve potency – behind.’ Self-Consciousness is Updike’s cobbled-together autobiography, written, or cobbled together, in response to the news that someone else was about to write the Life. It has huge faults, and huger (unrelated) virtues. But the ‘shabbiness’ that haunts Updike is generic – it comes with the territory; and funnily enough it is the shabbiness of imposture. The novelist cowers in the boiler-room of the self, where he works in his stinking singlet, his coccyx-baring jeans. In the autobiography he takes you back down there on an official tour or PR walkabout, dressed in a foreman’s crisp rompers.

  The autobiographer has all these duties to discharge. Of course, one is prepared for a certain amount of personal history, of deep background; and sure enough the screens and porches, the back streets and back yards, that toy, that field, that texture – the real estates of childhood – are exhaustively evoked. Updike was an obedient child ‘oversold’ on school (‘the faithful little habitué of the Shillington playground’), and he remains a methodical adult. We therefore get personal pre-history, too – and a sudden collapse, on Updike’s part, into near-sadistic garrulity. These forty pages are by many magnitudes the worst he has ever written.

  Updike may lack the pedigree of an Anthony Powell, who, in his memoirs, I seem to remember, traced himself back to someone like Beowulf, via Glendower and Robin of Loxley. But he apprises us all the same of Cousin George and Aunt Bessie and Uncle Arch. Then we read this:

  A cheerful slant on the New Jersey Updikes is offered by The Op Dyck Genealogy, written by Charles Wilson Opdyke and privately printed in Albany, New York, in 1889. Hartley’s grandfather, Peter, appears on page 333 …

  page 333? And now it’s George Opdyke and Gysbert op den Dyck and Louris Janesen op Dyck who begot Johannes Opdyck who begot Lawrence Updick. ‘Robust stock’, ‘a big bumptious race’ – oh, that hardy breed! When you learn that ‘Gysbert himself owned all of Coney Island’, you have to remind yourself that you’re not reading something very funny by John Cheever. But you’re not: you’re reading something very unfunny – something very po-faced and glazed-over – by John Updike. After an hour of this, I was reduced to recalling my own interest in personal lineage, which ended when I was sixteen, suspiciously soon after I looked up Amis in a dictionary of surnames and saw something like: ‘assoc. with the lower classes, esp. slaves’. It probably isn’t vainglory that animates Updike’s pages; it feels more like hobbyism or authorial thrift. Anyway, here we see Updike nude, without a stitch of irony or art.

  All fiction reveals the self, but it is the best – or the most interesting – self available, heated and purged into something a bit more rarefied. There is no reason, for instance, why a novelist’s opinions or ‘positions’ should be of special value, let alone special authority. And so it proves with Updike, who here frames his socio-political beliefs in an essay in cautious support of the Vietnam War. With his genius for place goes a genius for time, and ‘On Not Being a Dove’ is an expert recreation of the American Sixties, with its shamelessness and hysteria, its youth-worship, its intellectual stampedes. Updike wore ‘dashikis and love beads’, and ‘frugged’ to Janis Joplin, and he liked the promiscuity; but he didn’t like the radicalism – he didn’t like the promiscuity of the mind. Thus he seems to have supported the war largely out of a dislike for its opponents.

  The peace movement becomes, for him, an inexplicable excrescence (‘now along came this movement’) rather than a direct symptom of what the war was actually doing to America. Updike’s prose writhes in jargon, sentence-length cliché, and prissy sarcasm:

  It was all very well for civilised little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the US had nobody to hide behind. Credibility must be maintained. Power is a dirty business …

  Updike wisely confesses to something primitive in his response. But no atavism should lead him into such calibrated falsehood: ‘Under the banner of a peace movement … war was being waged by a privileged few upon the administration and the American majority that had elected it.’ In Rabbit Redux (1971) these sentiments almost got Harry Angstrom laughed out of town – and that town was Brewer, Pennsylvania. Even Harry, moreover, confronts a question that Updike avoids. There’s only one thing you need ask yourself about prosecuting a war you’re too old for: how would your stomach feel, in the provincial airport, as you waved your sons off to fight it?

  What’s the matter with him? Brooding in his tent, does he thirst for action? Here’s yet another hitch with the literary autobiography, though it is one that Updike eventually profits from: writers never go out. Whereas the memoirs of, say, Genghis Khan would have a guaranteed appeal, the novelist is nothing – is no novelist – without his aeons of repetitively anxious solitude. This makes for a curious self static, self-tasting, most alive when alone. The book’s unchallengeable success is its exploration of this cloistered quiddity. As usual, Updike has much to say about the human soul; but what distinguishes his book is its commentary on the human body.

  Updike’s body, a strange and endearing instrument, tricked out with all that wonky genes and a nervous disposition can viciously devise: psoriasis, asthma, claustrophobia, hydrophobia, arachnophobia, insomnia, poor teeth, a tendency to choke and a spectacular stammer. He writes of this, not with shame, but with ardour, like an articulate animal. Updike is above all an embarrassing writer: it is his recurrent weakness, and his unifying strength. He is always successfully taking you to where you don’t quite care to follow.

  The last section of the book, ‘On Being a Self Forever’, is to my knowledge the best thing yet written on what it is like to get older: age, and the only end of age.

  Insomnia offers a paradigm: the mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. At the first observed lurch into nonsensical thought we snap awake in eager anticipation, greedy to be asleep.

  Writing like this wins one’s deepest assent; it seems to enlarge the human community. But by now I find myself thinking that such sentences are too good, too universal, for a work of discourse and belong in a work of art (where, I hope and trust, they will shortly reappear). Self-Consciousness emerges as a crankily original way of showing how the photograph on the front of the book (Johnny at five: stubborn, querying, amused) became the photograph on the back. It has many brilliant pages. But the best page is unnumbered and comes near the beginning. It is the one that says he wrote Bech: A Book and Rabbit is Rich.

  Observer May 1989

  Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

  About halfway through Rabbit at Rest, the reader will start to hear a hoarse whisper in the background. You may feel it is your own heart that is doing the murmuring (for the book is all about ageing, about seizure and closure: it is itself an ending). Later on, though, the noise becomes more raucous and more generalized: perhaps it belongs to the sports arena or the auditorium; there is someth
ing of the herd instinct in it, involving you in a pleasant loss of individuality. At last you acknowledge that this is nothing other than the sound of applause, American applause: the ows and yays, the stomp of feet, the vociferous whistling. With Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971) and Rabbit is Rich (1981), John Updike loaded the bases. Rabbit at Rest is the home run. We can see him again now, in slow motion, the old batter jogging round the diamond, his pumped arm, his solemn high-fives with officials and trainers. With his head shyly inclined, he returns to the plate – to the bench-clearing welcome, and the big burbly roar of the crowd.

  Updike calls them ‘the Angstrom novels’, but we know them more familiarly as the Rabbit books. They span thirty years and 1,500 pages. And they tell the story, from youth to death, of a Pennsylvanian car salesman: averagely bigoted and chauvinistic, perhaps exceptionally gluttonous and lewd, but otherwise brutally undistinguished. It is as if a double-sized Ulysses had been narrated, not by Stephen, Bloom and Molly, but by one of the surlier underbouncers at Kiernan’s bar.

  What Updike is saying – or conclusively demonstrating – is something very simple: that the unexamined life is worth examining, that indeed it swarms with instruction and delight. Among prose works which address the American century, Rabbit has few obvious betters. The Adventures of Augie March. Probably Lolita. Possibly Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. Then what? If Updike lacks something in the way of vision and attack, he makes up for it in tirelessness and will. Like Anthony Burgess, he is a man of nineteenth-century amplitude. He’ll write his twenty letters and thirty pages in the morning, run for high office in the afternoon, go hunting at teatime, then look up from his pre-prandial epopee and say to his wife, ‘Fie upon this quiet life: I want work.’

  Rabbit at Rest opens and shuts in Florida, at the end of the Reagan era, in the fading glow of America’s elaborately doctored well-being. Harry Angstrom is retired now, and he is going to die pretty soon, so where else should he hang out but in the Sunset State, more specifically in a condo-complex called Valhalla (COD: ‘palace in which souls of slain heroes feasted’)? The malls are full of ‘sunstruck clinics – dental, chiropractic, cardiac, legal, legal-medical’ and prosthesis parlours; the corridors smell ‘of air freshener, to mask the mildew that creeps into every closed space’. ‘In Florida everybody is so cautious, as if on two beers they might fall down and break a hip. The whole state feels brittle.’

  The highways are full of big white soft-shocked power-steered American cars being driven by old people so shrunken they can barely see over the hood. Any time you get somewhere without a head-on collision is a tribute to the geriatric medicine in this part of the world, the pep pills and vitamin injections and blood thinners.

  Tall, sedentary Harry has just turned fifty-five. Rabbit is rich, but he’s fat now too, ‘a float of a man’ who sleeps curled up, giving ‘his belly room to slop into’; ‘shaving each morning, he seems to have acres of lather to remove.’ On the beach he stares at his feet: ‘so white and papery! As if he is standing up to his knees in old age.’ The ‘inner dwindling’ of Rich has become, in Rest, a sense of sclerotic and solitary doom. Soon, the doctors are telling Harry that he has ‘a typical American heart’. But this we already knew. The wife-and-children business quickly ‘palled for him’; and ‘other people, even so-called loved ones’, are just a strain on his routine. The reason he can’t leave his wife, Janice, Rabbit tearfully confesses to an ex-mistress, ‘is, without her, I’m shit’. His heart, then, is typical: ‘It’s tired and stiff and full of crud.’

  Another and more surprising kind of expansion has happened to Harry: intellectual growth. He is still a brute and a rube, still hemmed in by jargon and junk; and Updike doesn’t deny us the expected comedy. On the wall in the car showroom there hangs ‘a Playboy calendar, the girl for this month dressed up as a bare-assed Easter bunny, which Harry isn’t so sure strikes quite the right note’; later, receiving a Toyota executive, Harry babbles: ‘ “Miss Oshima, I mean Mr Shimada” ’ – Harry had been practising the name, telling himself it was ‘like Ramada with shit at the beginning’. Yet the indulgent distance between author and hero has been partly closed. One of the biggest laughs in Rabbit is Rich comes when Harry, in proud contemplation of his ‘den’, wonders if ‘in this room he might begin to read books, instead of just magazines and newspapers, and begin to learn about history, say’. Well, it has come to pass. He may not know much about geography (in a discussion about Portugal: ‘The only country over there I’ve ever wanted to go to is Tibet’), but he has taken up history, in his final death-driven surge towards ‘the big picture’.

  Harry, after all, will soon be history himself. The big picture is what Updike is going for, too. Rabbit tarries in Florida for only half the year. The rest of the time he is back in Brewer, in rustbelt Pennsylvania. Florida has history, glimpsed early on in a couple of guided tours of the local arcana. But history has called it a day down there; it is static, necrotic. Brewer is the scene of the continuing American experience. Here, in several passages of lordly brilliance, Updike gives a sense of the abject demographics of the city: upheaval and reinvention, the churnings and devourings of ‘development’, the human and material detritus of decay. Harry has been there, with his typical American heart. And by the time you start wondering whether he has what it takes to become a national metaphor, Rabbit is duly asked to lead a Fourth of July parade, as Uncle Sam. The set-piece that follows is a quietly frightening apotheosis.

  Flanked by a great press of young humanity and all its troubled dynamism, Rabbit marches, weeping with emotion (‘from the oceans, white with foam’), his heart thumping ‘worse and worse’, sick and giddy, ‘as if he has been lifted up to survey all human history’. Harry Angstrom, ‘as a loyal American’, isn’t going to attempt any radical critique of his homeland. But certain tormented gropings are allowed him. At one point (his hugely charmless son Nelson has just returned from a rehab clinic), Harry feels stifled by ‘induced calm and steadiness’. He turns to his granddaughter, ‘looking for an opening, a crack, a ray of undoctored light’. And doesn’t get it. ‘Undoctored’: Harry is surrounded by doctoring (he watches his own angioplasty on a monitor, as if it were just something else on TV); and he is surrounded by doctored thought, doctored language, doctored feeling. ‘I need to process’, ‘you should reinforce him’, ‘I was getting reacclimated.’ The professionalization of ordinary existence: this is the enemy within.

  In Rabbit at Rest the most candid prognosis on America is given by the Toyota executive, the one whose name is like Ramada with shit at the beginning. He says that America must change her ways. But Rabbit won’t change his. ‘They should just let people die,’ he says. ‘It’s modern science, you should be grateful,’ says his wife, utilitarian Janice, with her ‘blunt little knob of a nose, a nose with no more character than a drawer pull’. And the nature of Harry’s death, beautifully arrived at, suggests the countervailing forces of illusion and nostalgia. Uncle Sam, elderly now, dancing in worship of his vanished vigour.

  American superabundance is everywhere saluted and memorialized in Updike’s pages. Indeed, the rhythm of the Rabbit books always tends towards the enumerative, the encyclopaedic. This is a side-effect of Updike’s boyish braininess and easy mastery; like the author of Cursor Mundi, he puts down everything he knows, as a kind of analogy of divine knowledge. In two recent novels, The Witches of Eastwick and Roger’s Version, Updike crammed himself to PhD level in such areas as cosmology, computers, theology, Darwinism, necromancy, pottery and the cello. Rabbit at Rest throws in nutrition, addiction, heart surgery and real estate. The big picture is made up of lots of little pictures. Similarly in the external world, promiscuously absorbed, with hand following eye at great speed of scrutiny and encapsulation, Updike’s ravenousness makes you frown and shake your head in appalled admiration.

  An unfettered style is the central gamble of the tetralogy. It is a style that sees the big picture – time and space – in every passing sna
pshot and billboard. Updike is sometimes accused of overburdening Harry’s huddled mind; but the Rabbit books would be paltry things if they were exercises in mere mimesis. He lets the ordinary man sing and soar. For the ordinary man sings and soars in any case, but silently, until the novelist intercedes. Not for Updike the kind of prose that takes a vow of poverty. Such vows, besides, are more easily taken by the pauper than by the prince. And Updike is happy in his counting house. This novel is enduringly eloquent about weariness, age and disgust, in a prose that is always fresh, nubile and unwitherable. Here, on a small-hours drive across lowly Brewer, Updike’s prose takes Rabbit ‘over there’, to Portugal, to Tibet:

  The cars parked along the curbs display a range of unearthly colours, no longer red and blue and cream but cindery lunar shades, like nothing you can see or even imagine by daylight … The trimmed large bushes of the groomed yards, the yews and arborvitae and rhododendrons, look alert by night, like jungle creatures come to the waterhole to drink and caught in a camera’s flash.

  Independent on Sunday October 1990

  Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

  We often think in terms of literary pairs: Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and so on. But what about literary opposites? Jorge Luis Borges versus Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholson Baker versus Leon Uris, Thomas Pynchon versus C.P. Snow, Norman Mailer versus Anita Brookner. John Updike has no obvious soulmate or near equivalent (though Anthony Burgess harbours a similarly hyperactive cortex). But he does have an opposite, and a diametrical one: Samuel Beckett.