Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  There was the usual mellifluous murmur from the loudspeaker about seatbelts, emergency exits, oxygen masks. He wondered why stewardesses accented such unlikely words. [Macon] angled his book beneath a slender shaft of light and turned a page. The engines had a weary, dogged sound. It was the period he thought of as the long haul—the gulf between supper and breakfast when they were suspended over the ocean, waiting for that lightening of the sky that was supposed to be morning although, of course, it was nowhere near morning back home. In Macon’s opinion, morning in other time zones was like something staged—a curtain painted with a rising sun, superimposed upon the real dark.

  Real morning and real life are restricted to Baltimore, where Macon is one of four middle-aged siblings. His two brothers, Porter and Charles, after their marriages failed, moved in with their spinster sister, Rose, who still lives in the large house where they were raised by their grandparents; and Macon, after his wife leaves him and he breaks his leg, moves in also. There, they complete their daily routines by playing a card game, Vaccination, which they invented in their childhoods and which is too complex for outsiders to learn. The point of Macon’s guidebooks is to provide the unadventurous, “accidental” American traveller with information that minimizes the trauma of leaving home: where in Stockholm to get Kentucky Fried Chicken, what restaurants in Tokyo offer Sweet’n Low, how to avoid conversation in airplanes (“Always bring a book, as protection against strangers. Magazines don’t last”). His guides are manuals of cautious, systematic self-protectiveness; Ms. Tyler’s lovingly detailed, lively procession, from novel to novel, of mild-mannered agoraphobes and habit-hugging families has in Macon produced its theorist and its critic. The novel explores more forthrightly than any of its predecessors the deep and delicate conflict between coziness and venture, safety and danger, tidiness and messiness, home and the world, inside and outside, us and them.

  Anne Tyler never fails to produce a fluid, shapely story sparkling with bright, sharp images drawn from the so-called ordinary world. Her Baltimore, though a city of neighborhoods and ingrained custom, is also a piece of the American Northeast and of Western culture; her fiction readily relays the brand names and pop tunes and fashions of the moment, with special attention paid to shoe styles. Yet, unlike some younger writers, she does not imply that these flitting fads and headlines are all the culture there is. She is a Southern writer in her sense of the past; her old people have a fine vitality, and some of her most moving pages reconstruct an older time, as in Searching for Caleb and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. In her run of fiction since The Clock Winder (1972),‖ she has made Baltimore, as a site for imaginative construction, her own—John Barth tends to stick to the water and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Mencken’s city belongs to the Rooseveltian past. As a site, Baltimore is rich in characters and various in locale, yet with a cloistered and backwards-gazing quality like that of a less drastic Yoknapatawpha County, with the same convenience to a microcosm-maker.

  Ms. Tyler’s free rein there, with her artistic version of the metropolis unchecked by any other (compare the multiple shadows New York writers cast upon each other, or the way that Bellow must repeatedly shoulder aside Dreiser’s and Algren’s and Farrell’s ghosts in dealing with Chicago), abets our impression of a toy city, manipulated a bit lightly. Her generous empathy and distinguished intelligence run toward moments of precious diminishment. In the course of this novel, the Learys, all in their forties, fall to making together a dollhouse extension, and the author’s own delight breathes over their shoulders:

  The garage was convincingly untidy. Miniature wood chips littered the floor around a stack of twig-sized fire logs, and a coil of green wire made a perfect garden hose. Now they were working on the upstairs. Rose was stuffing an armchair cushion no bigger than an aspirin. Charles was cutting a sheet of wallpaper from a sample book. Porter was drilling holes for the curtain rods.

  Her characters whittle away at playful hobbies, and tinker at witty inventions. The cuteness of the names invented, in The Accidental Tourist, for fictional businesses savors less of mimesis than of literary foolery: Doggie, Do is an outfit that trains canines; Re-Runs names a second-hand-shoe store. Some of the Learys’ behavior seems unlikely even for reclusive and order-obsessed eccentrics. Macon treads underfoot each day’s dirty laundry while giving himself a shower, mounts a washbasket on a skateboard, and sleeps in “a giant sort of envelope made from one of the seven sheets he had folded and stitched together on the sewing machine.” His sister, Rose, “had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison,” which gives the reader a laugh but keeps Rose at a distance. And are we seriously to believe of the Learys that four prosperous adults enjoy such tenuous connections with the world at large that they casually agree not to answer the telephone in their house, ever, day after day? They just let it ring.

  The Accidental Tourist is lighter than its wholly admirable and relatively saturnine predecessor, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Ms. Tyler takes her time developing her story and fills much of the novel’s first third with domestic slapstick of the alphabetized-kitchen, treading-the-wash variety. The story is a basic one of break-up and break-out. A year before the novel’s first scene, the rude outside world has dealt Macon and his wife of twenty years, Sarah, a cruel blow: Ethan, their twelve-year-old son—“a tall blond sprout of a boy with an open, friendly face”—was senselessly murdered in a Burger Bonanza by a nineteen-year-old holdup man. Now Sarah announces that Macon has been no comfort and she is leaving him. Living alone, he breaks his leg and returns to his grandfather’s house, where he and his three siblings play Vaccination and ignore the telephone. However, the misbehavior of his pet dog, an irritable Welsh corgi called Edward (and up to midpoint the novel’s most sympathetic and intelligible character), brings into this airless situation a rasping breath of oxygen—dog-trainer Muriel Pritchett, who is younger, poorer, more vulgar and dynamic than Macon. That her brash and open world-view shakes up the careful Leary ways is predictable, as is the revival of Sarah’s interest when Macon makes himself at home with this new woman. But the turns and climaxes unfold with many small surprises, and after a high point (literally) where Macon panics at the revelation of distance afforded from what appears to be the top of the World Trade Center (“He saw the city spread far below like a glittering golden ocean, the streets tiny ribbons of light, the planet curving away at the edges, the sky a purple hollow extending to infinity”) the book becomes a real page-turner. This susceptible reader, his eyes beginning to blur, stopped twenty pages short of the end, fell into a troubled sleep, woke before dawn, read to the end, and only then relaxed. It is a happy ending, as happy as one can be in a world where “After a certain age … you can only choose what to lose.”

  In a time when many women writers find themselves quite busy enough proclaiming the difficulties of being female, Anne Tyler persistently concerns herself with the moral evolution of male characters. Though mild, passive Macon is not exactly macho, we live in his masculine skin for three hundred and fifty pages and see through his eyes what he sees in both women—plump, solid Sarah with her “calm face, round as a daisy,” skinny Muriel with her “spiky, pugnacious fierceness” and her eyes “very small, like caraway seeds.” The wife is rather more winningly portrayed than the girlfriend, and Macon loves her with less effort, but he gropes beyond that: “He began to think that who you are when you’re with somebody may matter more than whether you love her.” With Sarah, he has been, as she herself charges, “muffled.” She tells him, “It’s like you’re trying to slip through life unchanged.” Yet she herself confirms the basis of the Leary caution: the world is a terrible place. “Ever since Ethan died,” she tells him, “I’ve had to admit that people are basically evil. Evil, Macon. So evil they would take a twelve-year-old boy and shoot him through the skull for no reason. I read a paper now and I despair; I’ve given up watching the news on TV. There’s so much wickedness, children set
ting other children on fire and grown men throwing babies out second-story windows, rape and torture and terrorism, old people beaten and robbed, men in our very own government willing to blow up the world, indifference and greed and instant anger on every street corner.”

  Muriel takes Macon outside himself. And distinctly beneath his own social level. An Accidental Tourist is about, in part, crossing class boundaries. One doesn’t have to be a Baltimorean to perceive that Singleton Street, where Muriel lives with her sickly and repulsive seven-year-old son, Alexander, and Timonium, where her parents dwell in a development called Foxhunt Acres, are a far socio-economic cry from North Charles Street, where Macon and Sarah had their home, and the unnamed avenue where Macon’s grandfather, a factory owner, reared his four grandchildren. Macon went to Princeton, and nothing about Muriel exasperates him more than her solecisms—“eck cetera,” “nauseous” when she means “nauseated,” “enormity” when she means to talk of size, “da Vinci” when she should say “Leonardo,” and (very subtle, this) “a nother,” as in “I wish I was just a totally nother person.”

  It is Macon, however, who becomes another person: “In the foreign country that was Singleton Street he was an entirely different person.” An accidental tourist within Baltimore, “he was beginning to feel easier here. Singleton Street still unnerved him with its poverty and its ugliness, but it no longer seemed so dangerous.” The hoodlums hanging out, he perceives, are “pathetically young and shabby,” and children and women bring a constant cleansing wind of “good intentions.” The scruffy society of neighborhood women that collects in Muriel’s kitchen comes to feel as cozy to him as a game of Vaccination; one wonders, indeed, whether he truly adjusts to this tawdry neighborhood or whether it has been simply annexed to the gaily colored, miniaturized precincts of Tylerville. “Macon saw Singleton Street in his mind, small and distant … and full of gaily drawn people scrubbing their stoops, tinkering with their cars, splashing under fire hydrants.” A mugger accosts them, but Muriel swats him with her purse and tells him to run on home. Can Baltimore’s underworld really be this easily disarmed? When Mrs. Soffel, in last year’s movie of the same name, left her safe quarters in the warden’s end of the Allegheny County Jail for disgrace and likely doom with an escaping criminal, that was de-domestication with a price tag. Macon doesn’t so much leave home as change homes; retaining his money, he, like many before him, finds the slums more fun than the proper neighborhoods.

  But yes, people are not evil. Or not only evil. And they prove more responsive and entertaining than a stay-at-home would suppose. Muriel has never travelled. When she tells Macon, “If I could go anywhere I’d go to Paris,” he quickly informs her, “Paris is terrible. Everybody is impolite.” Yet in the eventual event (not to give away Ms. Tyler’s slam-bang denouement) Paris for Muriel abounds with polite, helpful, English-speaking persons, who guide her toward fantastic bargains in second-hand clothes. Throughout the book, people spontaneously open up and talk about themselves—taxi-drivers, airplane pilots, neighbors, camp directors. Anne Tyler’s mankind is a race of compulsive fabulists: everybody in motion, talking. Looking out of a plane window as he takes Muriel for her first flight, Macon has “an intimate view of farmlands, woodlands, roofs of houses. It came to him very suddenly that every little roof concealed actual lives. Well, of course he’d known that, but all at once it took his breath away. He saw how real those lives were to the people who lived them—how intense and private and absorbing.” Though not every mugger can really be chased away with a swat, and not every Parisian is in fact polite to American yokels, an assumption to the contrary offers a basis for moving ahead. We should credit strangers and outsiders with a self-interest as intense and complex as our own—not an obvious fact to the initially timorous and solipsistic human organism—and with a benignity to match our trust. If Anne Tyler strikes us as too benign, too swift to tack together shelter for her dolls, it may be that we have lost familiarity with the comedic spirit, the primal faith in natural resilience and the forces of renewal. Like the older, graver Iris Murdoch, Ms. Tyler believes in love and art and the usefulness of a shaking-up. The constructive, tinkering, inventive, systematic side of our selves is not enough; he who would save his life must lose it.

  “It occurred to [Macon] that the world was divided sharply down the middle: Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them. But he could not have said, not in a million years, why he was so moved by the sight of Muriel’s thin quilt trailing across the floor where she must have dragged it when she rose in the morning.” He cannot say, but the book itself slyly spells it out: Macon’s mother, Alicia, glimpsed but rarely in the novel, is herself of the party of the careless. A woman of tempestuous and fleeting enthusiasms, she had been widowed in World War II and in 1950 remarried, to “an engineer who travelled around the world building bridges,” and settled her four children with their grandparents in Baltimore. “They were met by their grandparents, two thin, severe, distinguished people in dark clothes. The children approved of them at once.” Henceforth, “like some naughty, gleeful fairy,” their mother “darted in and out of their lives leaving a trail of irresponsible remarks.” When Rose marries, Alicia, now on her fourth husband, startles Macon by being at the wedding, displeases him with her gaudy outfit (“a long white caftan trimmed with vibrant bands of satin, and when she reached up to hug him a whole culvert of metal bangles clattered and slid down her left arm”), and links arms with Muriel. “Macon had a sudden appalling thought: Maybe in his middle age he was starting to choose his mother’s style of person, as if concluding that Alicia—silly, vain, annoying woman—might have the right answers after all. But no. He put the thought away from him.” But the thought is a good one. We are all, however careful, the children of chaos. Leaving home can be going home.

  No More Mr. Knightleys

  SUPERIOR WOMEN, by Alice Adams. 368 pp. Knopf, 1984.

  Take a group of female college friends. Simmer them in the post-graduate decades, tossing in timely headlines and fashions to taste. Add lovers, husbands, fathers, deaths, and at least one lesbian relationship. Bring to a boil close to the present time, and serve. This recipe, or something like it, seems to be a popular one; Rona Jaffe can’t stay away from reunions, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group put Candice Bergen in the movies. Now Alice Adams has come up with Superior Women, which takes five Radcliffe students—Megan Greene, Lavinia Harcourt, Peg Harding, Cathy Barnes, and Janet Cohen—from their first meeting in June of 1943, in Cambridge, to a June exactly forty years later, in northern Georgia. Readers of Ms. Adams’s short story “Roses, Rhododendron” will be reminded of it—it, too, tells of female friendship dating from the Forties and sustained by letters, though the girls are ten instead of seventeen. As in the pairing of Lavinia and Megan, the one girl is cool and Southern and the other is needy and “hot,” with an eccentric mother and the antique business in her background; superficially antithetical, both girls are intelligent and bookish and become, somehow, one. Such female alliances repeat throughout Superior Women, in a number of forms, across an American landscape of great breadth and sharp detail. Cambridge and Boston, New York and White Plains, Fredericksburg and Chapel Hill, Palo Alto and San Francisco, West Texas and northern Georgia are some of the locales knowingly evoked; as the characters become ever more mobile, erotic trysts take them to momentarily vivid hotel rooms in Alaska and Hawaii, so that a survey of our American vastness, not omitting the newer states, appears to be in progress. As happened in The Group twenty years ago, a natural short-story writer’s avidity for the telling detail becomes, extended over a wide-ranging plurality of characters and events, rather actuarial; a certain bleakly notational texture overtakes the survey, and the reader feels that he is not so much enjoying vicarious experience as sampling data.

  The first hundred pages of Superior Women move slowest and least skimmingly; they take place at Radcliffe between 1943 and 1
946. Megan, back home in Palo Alto, has been smitten by “a post–prep school boy from New England,” George Wharton, whose “compellingly exotic” looks, clothes, and accent excite her to a lifelong romance with things Eastern. She comes to Radcliffe—a bold, continent-spanning move—and meets the four other superior women of the title, all bright, we are somewhat insistently assured, and all resident in Barnard Hall; Janet Cohen, because she is Jewish, stands apart from her three housemates, of whom Lavinia is outspokenly anti-Semitic. The intricacies of remaining “technical virgins,” the degradations of dating drunken and inept college boys, the rise and fall of romantic passions, the subtle but intensely felt shifts of closeness among the young women are lovingly and expertly laid bare. Megan, the most full-bodied and ardent of them, surrenders her virginity to a Jewish section man, Simon Jacoby, while her original heartthrob, George Wharton, defects to a girl of his social class; Lavinia crosses her own class lines to love the Irish Gordon Shaughnessey, who inconsiderately dies of a burst appendix; Peg unexpectedly collapses into pregnancy and marriage; Cathy is whirlwind-courted by her fellow Catholic “Phil-Flash” Flannigan; and Janet remains the patient admirer of the exuberant, foulmouthed, gifted, and Marxist Adam Marr. Graduation Day arrives and they go their separate ways, if they haven’t already gone. Janet marries Adam, and Lavinia, done mourning Gordon Shaughnessey, marries the uninspiring but presentable Potter Cobb. Megan, after a year in Paris with the Marrs and others, travels to New York, carries on with a gorgeous black trombonist called Jackson Clay, works in publishing, and becomes a prosperous literary agent. She lives on West Twelfth Street; uptown, Lavinia settles into an East Sixties life of parties, interior decoration, and creeping discontent. Peg endures four children and the Texas climate until fondness for her Negro cook, Cornelia, leads her into social consciousness and rebellion. Cathy attends graduate school at Stanford and sees a fatherly priest a few times too often. As to the Marrs, Adam makes a great splash as a playwright and goes from being obnoxious to atrocious, while the divorced Janet heads for the haven of a medical degree. And that’s not the half of it; the book in its latter stretches has so much plot, so summarily relayed, that it reads like the class notes crowded at the back of an alumnae magazine. Children and traumas and political movements are reduced to rumors that pop up in letters or conversations among the rapidly aging old friends; it all bounces along so briskly that the author seems to assign no importance to these events save a demographic one: this is what tends to happen to you if you graduated from Radcliffe in 1946. Typically, you marry, are miserable, have some miserable children, and take comfort in pills and affairs (Lavinia) or communal living and liberal activism (Peg).