Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Her affair with her uncle, too, is a flirtation with nothingness, beginning with a clumsy assault in a deserted Adirondacks hotel:

  Still he said nothing. He seemed hardly aware of her except as a presence, a body giving him some small unwitting resistance, his will was dominant, all-obliterating. Enid understood that he was detached from her and from the rather anguished mechanical act he had performed, even as he stood swaying drunken against her, his arm crooked around her neck locking her in place, his hot shamed face in her hair, still he was somehow separate from her, saying her name, her name, so sweet so sweet so sweet—he swallowed a belch and Enid smelled beer.

  She accepts the obliteration, writing him, “Anything you do to me—it’s what I want.” Her attempted suicide, insofar as it is a romantic stratagem, demonstrates to him her toughness and places them on a plane of equality as death-defiers, as familiars of violence. Felix recognizes this: “He didn’t love her but there was this connection between them now, this bond. A blood bond as if between two men who’d fought each other to a draw.” He was, when younger, a promising boxer; Enid, at the age of nine, was taken to see him box, “a man in a white silk robe trimmed in gold his face cross-hatched with blood whom she didn’t know and who didn’t know her.” With a child’s sharp eyes she sees amazing things at the prizefight: “Enid, squinting through her fingers, transfixed, saw a blow of her uncle’s strike the other man on the side of the head, a terrible blow so that sweat flew like sparks in the bright lights.” She sees Felix’s opponent hit by the knockout left hook, “lifting his chin from beneath, shaking free a rainbow of moisture, a flying skein of blood.” She “felt her bowels cramp thinking it was something you shouldn’t see but there it was,” and afterwards in her dreams she “could taste the trickle of blood, the back of her tongue was coated with something slimy and red, she couldn’t swallow.”

  Violence is not just the projection of inward tumult and fear; it exists—“there it was.” Joyce Carol Oates, both the writer and the person, is drawn to boxing as a curiously intimate, visible, regulated, caged yet living specimen of the nightmare that surrounds our fragile shelters and delusively peaceful lives. Like Hemingway and Mailer, she suggests that violence is uniquely authentic. But Mailer’s writing on boxing is sports journalism compared with the fight descriptions in You Must Remember This—especially the terrific pages (246–52) that show the destruction of young Jo-Jo Pearl by an older fighter, Byron McCord. Miss Oates’s comma-stingy, onrushing style pays off in such runs as “and there suddenly was Jo-Jo staggering back into the ropes unable to fall and McCord hammering away at him to the heart to the gut to the head slicing him open around the eyes and mouth in a matter of seconds as if he’s taken a razor to the flesh.” A dreadful beauty, an illumination of what men can endure, attaches to a sentence like “Jo-Jo continued to circle him bouncing on his toes and feinting as if his body performed by rote while his head rang, aglow with pain so intense it had no name.” We learn that a boxer goes for the other’s eyes, with the thumbs and laces of his gloves; we learn that a hazard of ringside seats is having your camel-hair coat spattered with blood; we experience a boxer’s childlike daze as he sinks toward death of “subarachnoid hemorrhaging.” As far as this reader is concerned, the sport could be outlawed on the strength of this single horrendous, yet relentlessly factual, fight scene.

  Sex, too, in Miss Oates’s telling, is a nightmare come true. “She heard herself cry out helplessly, crazily—the delirious words I love you I love love love you or no words at all, only frightened sounds like those of a small child being beaten.” Unblinkingly the processes are detailed whereby an adolescent girl is loosened up by red wine and vodka and enjoyed in a succession of motels, and initiated into the full range of sensual possibility, and so habituated to lying that she comes to like it, and kidnapped from her high-school lunch hour by her jealous older lover in his cream-colored Cadillac Eldorado, and impregnated in their erotic fury, and then subjected to an abortion. The abortion is as harrowing, and as calmly detailed, as Jo-Jo’s fight. All earthly experience, it comes to seem, except for Enid’s homework and her piano lessons, is founded on some basic desecration. Not only chemical smells haunt Port Oriskany but Roman Catholicism, a creed shunned by most of the characters but present in whiffs, as when Enid thinks, “Whatever happened she deserved. She knew she deserved it because it happened.” This echoes a saying of Nietzsche’s that appears in Marya, a recent book of linked short stories which presents, as it were, the academic, intellectually achieving aspect of Enid: “Marya noted a chilling aphorism of Nietzsche’s. Terrible experiences give one cause to speculate whether the one who experiences them may not be something terrible.” Victim and criminal, death and love, dream and reality can fuse when subjectivity, instead of being regarded as a mere epiphenomenon within objective reality, is granted a power of its own. Miss Oates, her earlier jacket flaps told us, majored in English at Syracuse University and minored in philosophy; quotes from Heraclitus, Spinoza, William James, and others offer to orient us in her seething fiction. Something Neoplatonic, of Berkeley’s esse est percipi, licenses her visionary outpouring. Her fictional worlds exist to be consumed by her characters’ passions and perceptions; the universe has no meaning beyond its uses by the feverish human spirit, and does not receive, therefore, the kind of artistic homage that imitates its enduring structure. Her plots suggest not architecture but cloud formation, beginning and ending in air; there is rarely a sentence that arrests a moment for its own cherishable sake, in a crystallization of language. All is flowing, shifting context. Her worlds refuse to enclose, to be pleasant. Prayers arise from them, but no praise.

  You Must Remember This, away from its consummate portraits of two violent wills, is relatively thin, but solid enough to frame those portraits. Lyle Stevick’s tatty second-hand-furniture store and his jumbled timorous mind convince us; his obsession with a backyard bomb shelter seems somewhat allegorical. His three daughters neatly enact, as in a fairy tale, three possibilities open to girls in the Fifties: Geraldine marries into a local life of chronic pregnancy and domestic drudgery; Lizzie becomes a singer, an entertainer, and possibly a hooker in New York City; and Enid goes off to college.§ Their brother, Warren, a Korean vet and an early anti-nuclear protester, becomes almost interesting enough to warrant a novel of his own. In this novel Miss Oates does a daring amount of male stream of consciousness: she lets us know how men feel battering at each other in a prize ring, lusting after hat-check girls, watching each other sink or swim, speeding along in their fancy cars, and struggling against their wandering thoughts to maintain an erection during lovemaking. A very full model of Port Oriskany is clairvoyantly, affectionately constructed, so that we can watch it burn.

  Beattieniks

  LOVE ALWAYS, by Ann Beattie. 247 pp. Random House, 1985.

  Ann Beattie, though there has always been a kind of fond humor in her deadpan, delicate stories of languishing young lives and her willingness to transcribe the grotesquer details of American popular culture, has not hitherto been satirical. Satire must stand outside a world and its values; it implies a better way of doing things, a certain doctrinal position, whether it be Waugh’s Catholicism, Orwell’s anti-Communism, Twain’s roughneck skepticism, or Beerbohm’s hermetic dandyism. There must be some energy of indignation, of rejection. Miss Beattie’s power and influence, on the contrary, arise from her seemingly resistless immersion in the stoic bewilderment of a generation without a cause, a generation for whom love as well as politics is a consumer item too long on the shelves and whose deflationary mood is but dimly brightened by the background chirping of nostalgia-inducing pop tunes and the faithful attendance of personable pet dogs; in the now-swollen chorus of minimalist fiction, it was she who first found the tone for the post-Vietnam, post-engagé mood, much as Hemingway found the tone for his own generation’s disenchantment with all brands of officially promoted importance. Both authors remade reality out of short, concrete sentences and certifiable
if small sensations; in the absence of any greater good, the chronic appearance of food on the table became an event worth celebrating: “Edward made them tabouli burgers for lunch. He had brought these, frozen, in a cooler that said It’s Miller Time!, from Los Angeles.”

  In Love Always, Miss Beattie seems to be on the attack, though her targets dissolve so quickly that she keeps popping new characters into the gallery. The scene is Vermont; some additional developments, along with frozen tabouli burgers, arrive from Los Angeles. The time is the summer of 1984, with nostalgic references to Walter Mondale, the porn-tainted Miss America, and the mass murder at McDonald’s. Most of the characters are about thirty-five. The hero, called Hildon (like Madonna and Hildegarde, he has only one name), two years earlier founded an unlikely magazine called Country Daze, which has purportedly caught on with the nationwide tribe of aging Baby Boomers:

  Hildon was quite up front about telling his friends that the magazine’s success was proof positive that the entire country was coked-out. Hundreds of readers wrote in every month—readers who had caught the slightest, trendiest in-jokes.… Thousands of people had filled out a request form, in the last issue, to have the psychmobile come to their houses. This was one of Hildon’s new concepts; it was modeled on the idea of the bookmobile, but instead of books to check out, there was a staff of psychologists to evaluate people’s mental condition and see whether they should be checked in.

  Though this joke seems broad, the novel offers no evidence to contradict Hildon’s fundamental diagnosis of the nation as “coked-out” (not to be confused with a later locution, “tranqued-up”). Country Daze’s most successful feature is Cindi Coeur’s advice column, giving flip answers to flaky questions. E.g., “Boxstep Betty” writes in to complain that her fiancé “loves to dance” and “wants us to do the hand jive at our wedding and have break dancing at the reception”; “Cindi Coeur” advises “Box” to have her fiancé checked for pinworms. A literary device that in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts served to frame a furious protest against the world’s pain has become, fifty years later, callous, freaky chatter, a kind of talk show in print.

  Yet Lucy, who writes both questions and answers, is our heroine; amid all the incidental static and jokiness of the novel she emerges as its most sympathetic figure—“solid,” her fourteen-year-old niece, Nicole, comes grudgingly to perceive. Nicole lives in Los Angeles with Lucy’s truly coked-out sister, Jane, and is an actress on a soap opera called, with an allusion to Yeats we are not allowed to overlook, Passionate Intensity. While her mother carries on with a twenty-four-year-old tennis player, Nicole is shipped east, and brings to the merry band of Green Mountain Yuppies her Hollywood style of cultural imbalance: she is very up on television-serial personnel but has never heard of Jonah and the whale. Ms. Beattie is at her warmest with precocious and lonely children; Lucy’s developing maternal feelings toward her spacy, famous, yet not invulnerable niece form one of the novel’s few traceable themes. The novel holds a dazing wealth of anecdote and attributed eccentricity: Noonan, a homosexual writer for the magazine, likes to steal things; Peter, his lover and a specialist in in utero surgery, drives a refurbished Checker cab with leopardskin jump seats and a black bear rug; Piggy Proctor, Nicole’s agent, communicates with her by taping antic TDK cassettes; Hildon likes to make love while viewing videotapes from other moments of his life and further enhances his existence by disguising himself, in a “Born to Lose T-shirt, torn jeans, pointed-toe boots with spurs,” as a “shit kicker”—that is, a normal, local person. These locals, however, seem as prone to personality tics and infestation by media-think as the Manhattan émigrés, and the Forest of Arden called Vermont offers little contrast to the play of imported dissatisfaction that serves, in Love Always, for comedy.

  The author’s view of the world is not comedic: no conceivable social order could be drawn firm, in Shakespearean style, when her romantic hurly-burly exhausts itself. Marriage, the traditional end of comedy and of Jane Austen novels (Austen and Scott Fitzgerald haunt this book along with Yeats), ranks here as a disaster area: Lucy and Jane’s father deserted them, Jane’s husbands are wildly loserish, Lucy helps to break up Hildon’s marriage without a flinch of compunction, and she, momentarily considered as wife-material by a long-time suitor, is rejected for the fey reason that “She was wonderful, but she wasn’t right.” The changing nature of heterosexual relations and, particularly, the Protean unsatisfactoriness of men prompt Lucy’s most extended meditations:

  Whatever crazy thoughts men had about other people, they would eventually have about her. If they distrusted the whole world and trusted her implicitly, they would come to distrust her; if they were not close to anyone and they attached themselves to her, one day they would just remove themselves. If you demonstrated, day by day, that you were not the person they feared, they would be confused for a while, but gradually they would stop trusting logic and become frightened.

  There is, in short, no pleasing men, on any kind of substantial basis; indeed, they have no substance, they are all pose and fantasy. Lucy accuses Les Whitehall, a previous beau: “When I tried to deal with you as a real person instead of idolizing you, you left.” She reflects that, for all Les’s charm, “in reality he did not approve of himself or of anyone else. Anyone who had less than he had wasn’t worth his time, and anyone who had more was a threat.” Hildon ends by perceiving that “nobody was his type.” Les has written Lucy claiming of Hildon that he is in Vermont “in hiding from being a serious person.” Hildon is an editor, though we never see him edit; Les is a teacher, though we never see him teach; Hildon hates Les. These two are rivals, the two romantic leads of Lucy’s inner videotape, yet are so interchangeable that Les finally slips into Hildon’s job, while Hildon sinks into an ending as bitter and smoky as that of a Don DeLillo novel.

  Unreality, insubstantiality, interchangeability: these make up the novel’s agenda, and are built disturbingly into its texture. Many of the characters seem superfluous, but then perhaps they all, and we all, are superfluous. Several introduced early with a promising flourish, like Nigel the photographer and Cameron Petrus the Bostonian and Matt Smith the new publisher of Country Daze, fade away as if forgotten by their creator; others, such as Myra DeVane the investigative reporter, have a continuing presence in the novel but no defined personality. A second interviewer, Andrew Steinborn, enters the novel to illustrate, as if we doubted it, that a man can be an aspiring writer and still be a fool and a lout. His girlfriend, Lillian, finds his gift for empathy wearisome: “He wanted them to be very close, so whenever they had a disagreement, he would later say out loud what he intuited that she felt. It was scary; he would become her—when he spoke from what he thought to be her mind, even his face took on her likeness. It made her hate every thought she had, rational or irrational.” Yet, eighty pages later, it is Les whom we witness performing this trick, with Lucy:

  He … jutted out his chin the way Lucy did when she was angry. “So you’ve got a new car, Les,” he said. “Big deal … And the women are a notion pretty much like cars to you, aren’t they? Turn one in, get another one. When you do these things, aren’t you embarrassed? Or can you really pretend, pretend so well that you convince yourself?”

  The characters are oddly transparent—jellyfish through which one keeps seeing the same saltwater. Myra DeVane has a tryst at the Plaza, after Andrew Steinborn has been extolling its chic to Lillian. Nicole tries to read Pride and Prejudice, the same book Lucy’s mother read to her as a girl. Are these connections, or symptoms of a presiding carelessness? The events do not feel consecutive, scenes that we want to witness are left out, scenes developed at length come to little, and the plot is twitched back and forth as if in mimicry of Passionate Intensity’s episodes.

  “The best lack all conviction,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” These best and brightest lack conviction and with it the coherence that make fictional characters in the old-fashioned sense; they are no
t so much round or flat, in E. M. Forster’s geometrical terminology, as on or off. Images on a cathode-ray tube are produced by a bombardment of electrons; a pointillist bombardment from the culture at large seems to conjure up Lucy and her friends, who wink out in their own minds as readily as in our own. Too much self-consciousness evaporates the self. All pursuits end up trivialized. Take away the brand names, the slogans, the nicely worked-out costumes and postures, and you have blank tape. Lucy intermittently looks around her, at what she imagines is Vermont:

  From where Lucy sat, she couldn’t see the trickle of muddy river below. The farmhouse with the blue roof she had always loved was visible on the hillside, and people hardly larger than dots were moving around it—people and cows—more of those mysterious people who thought something and felt some way Lucy couldn’t fathom. People who lived in a house in a valley.

  Yet the reader has no reason to suppose that the house in the valley holds anything different; it is just another blip, a few more jiggling dots, on a screen called Lucy.

  Leaving Home

  THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, by Anne Tyler. 355 pp. Knopf, 1985.

  Anne Tyler’s tenth novel manages to leave Baltimore; its hero, Macon Leary, writes a series of travel guides under the pseudonym of “Accidental Tourist,” and his creator, whose many virtues have not hitherto included cosmopolitanism, provides for him convincing, characteristically perky versions of London and Paris, Edmonton and Vancouver, as well as some vivid airplane rides. Transatlantic jet travel is authoritatively sketched: