Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  Novels are not just news; we ask some stretch of imagination, some attempt to extend the author’s witness into human possibilities beyond the edge of his or her experience. Three recently published novels—by an Italian, a Japanese, and an American born in the Philippines—each show a brave reach, geographic and otherwise.

  Yucatán has as narrator a young Englishman, Dave Hollis; as central figure an internationally revered Yugoslavian film director, Dru Resnik; and as setting southern California and some way-out spaces in Mexico. Resnik and Dave fly from London to Los Angeles to meet Jack Nesbitt, a thick-necked millionaire who has lined up a meeting with Astor Camado, a never-photographed but best-selling author whose four books “tell the same story from four different points of view.… A young New York musicologist of South American extraction goes to Mexico to do some research and meets this Indian witch doctor, who little by little draws him into a vortex of magic practices, until he’s brought into contact with a world beyond, or a parallel world, if you like.” Nesbitt wants to produce a movie by Resnik based upon these books, and the author himself appears and speaks amiably of the world beyond (“A completely empty, dark room. There’s nothing to recognize, nothing happens. There is only this absolute blackness”) and the secret of life (“The secret is knowing that absolutely everything is insignificant: love and activity and relationships and feelings, landscapes, desires, plans, et cetera. They’re nothing but bric-a-brac, little pieces of kitsch scattered around. The secret is not to be there. You understand what I mean?”). Thus unburdened, he hands Resnik his “stick of power” and disappears from the novel.

  Advisers from the other, or parallel world, however, take over, sending messages by pencilled notes “written in a shaky and sprawling hand,” messages like “Attention, wrongly directed, is dangerous, because it rebounds. We are watching you.” The world is just one big fortune cookie to these mysterious others. They telephone, too, in voices that are “almost electronic, but not exactly,” with “some kind of expression, underneath,” and function as travel agents, sending our trio of movie makers, and the female companions they effortlessly accumulate, to specified parts of Mexico and back. The characters are not very real, and their actions seem inconsistent and implausible, but perhaps that is the point. We are somehow inside a movie being made, proceeding by jump cuts and changed camera angles, in an atmosphere of agitated stasis. Dave and the woman, Elaine, designated by the voices as “the spiritual girl,” get into bed together in a steamy Mexican motel, but can’t quite make love, because, explains Elaine, “Tomorrow we have to receive enlightenment in the positive place.” Dave narrates:

  It’s a kind of ridiculous, confused torture; it’s not doing us much good. We move in fits, sweating, our legs incredibly nervous, tangled in the sheets of the two sagging beds, and it’s clear that whoever the voice is and whatever he wants, we’re involved in a game conducted by others, and there’s no way we can get out of it on our own.

  Frustrating as it is, this scene is one of the more comprehensible ones, and relatively loaded with feeling, or at least with itching.

  Everything happens as if to tourists who can’t shake their jet lag. People keep being speechless, and ordering food in restaurants without eating it. Dave is jealous of and irritated by Resnik, with his off-again-on-again charm, his habit of directorial manipulation, his “spoiled superstar” airs. Nesbitt tags along in this increasingly weird project, frequently exasperated but never visibly tired of shelling out money for hotels, plane fares, and, in the end, a battery of expensive musical instruments. The women, like many women in movies, are good-looking but toylike—magnetized toys, drawn to Resnik, whom even waitresses sense to be a starmaker. The dialogue at times seems straight from a B-movie, as do the tropical scenery and the feeble strain of science fiction. Our narrator keeps noting filmic effects, like synchronization and discontinuity: “as if synchronized, we get up”; “the preparation of the flambé seems to go in jerks, like a film sequence from which frames have been snipped at random.” A wannabe director, Dave stands outside his own actions: “My head is incredibly confused, with overlapping images of three or four possible reactions. I see myself detached, allowing her to leave; dragging her back inside; going out and facing Nesbitt. None of these possibilities is a complete sequence.” Caressing Elaine in a romantic tropical shower, he reflects wonderingly “that of all the situations that have ever happened to me in my life, this is the closest to a film.” Elsewhere, he mentally scolds her for not staying in character: “It’s incredible how little she cares about maintaining any coherence of character; even with respect only to last night, or this morning.”

  But Dave and his creator are less into character than into atmosphere, and as an atmospheric seismograph the novel registers some very delicate jiggles: “The abandoned film is in the air: a kind of vibration just below or just above the muffled sounds of the lobby.” The great Resnik, to whose thoughts we are privy by way of italics, broods, “The atmosphere is disjointed, not fluid, as I had imagined; neither attraction nor isolation is sufficiently strong to prevail over the other.” Waxing spookier, he lectures his entourage, “People don’t realize how dangerous negative landscapes can be. If you cross them without any kind of shielding, on a motorcycle, for example, they can even destroy you. I’m sure there are people who are dissolved, never found again.” And when the group visits, at the behest of the voices from beyond, the monumental Yucatán ruins at Tis Talan and Atsantil, the negative and positive vibes are exhaustively plumbed. At Atsantil:

  The equilibrium of the stones seems temporary, as if in the course of the night someone could come and pull a couple of buildings closer together, or move them apart, or even dismantle them to use their material differently. At the same time, the whole is curiously strong, not having to overcome great pressures or resistance.… The tourists are not made insignificant by the imposing ferocity of buildings or by the enormity of empty space, as at Tis Talan; the movements and sounds here are absorbed by the landscape, purified without the knowledge of those who produce them. It doesn’t even seem to be hot anymore, though the sun is at its peak and the light is extraordinarily intense.

  There is beauty in such a laid-back, entranced evocation of atmospheric nuance, and there is a curious authenticity in Andrea De Carlo’s washed-out, flimsy, heartless little movie of a novel. This is how the world seems as the millennium evaporates: a series of hotel rooms and tourist sights at which we arrive numbed by the journey. If there is a woman in the hotel room, she blends right in, like the objects in Elaine’s friend Rickie’s slide show, “photographed as if their use or normal meaning were unknown.” We have lost touch with the why of things, and what is left is fast food for the senses and the humming brain. Mr. De Carlo’s native Italy is perhaps still too saturated with traditional meanings, too full of inhabited historical allusions, so he had to come to the New World, the empty opulence of southern California and Mexico’s death-haunted poverty, for the atmosphere he needed, the flickering bleached shimmer of not-being-there-ness.

  Kunio Tsuji, the author of The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States, has travelled far geographically—he studied in Paris for four years—and imaginatively, setting this, his first novel to be translated into English, in the sixteenth century and in the mind and voice of a European. The narrative is framed as a long epistle from a nameless Italian soldier of fortune who finds himself for a few years an intimate of the Portuguese missionaries in Japan and of a warlord whom he calls the Signore but whom any Japanese reader, the translator assures us in a preface, would recognize as Oda Nobunaga (1534–82). Nobunaga was a chieftain of the small province of Owari, who managed, by dint of his cleverness and ferocity, to subdue twenty of the provinces around the beleaguered imperial capital of Kyoto and thus to take the first and crucial step in the unification of Japan after two centuries of chaotic civil war. A kind of George Washington, we might say, who had to conquer and massacre rival forces in the states around Virginia, all in the
nominal service of a powerless royal government. Nobunaga is not named in Mr. Tsuja’s novel, but his successors in the unifying process, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, are. The only fictional character is the narrator; he, we are concisely informed, murdered his wife and her lover in an alley in Genoa, fled to Lisbon, worked as a porter and lived as a vagrant, enlisted in an expedition to the New World, served as an officer under cruel conditions, joined a Spanish fleet sailing for the Molucca Islands, and spent ten years at sea. He landed in Japan in 1570, at a village where there existed a small Christian church and several Japanese friars. “My first impression of the Japanese,” he writes his Italian confidant, “was of a fair-skinned, courteous people who smiled readily and were extremely clean in their persons. Nor later did I have much cause to revise this opinion, except insofar as the courtesy and affability of the Japanese is not infrequently tempered with a kind of contempt or condescension, a combination not generally seen among the peoples of Europe.”

  Mr. Tsuji, to judge by this stately and lucid translation, maintains his cultural contortion gracefully, viewing the Japanese and their military tumult through the eyes of a renegade Latin. The narrator’s voice seems sometimes prim and pedantic for such a ruffian, but, then, the author has set himself a basically philosophical problem: the humanization of Nobunaga, who was considered brutal and vindictive by even the lenient standards of feudal Japan. George Sansom, in his History of Japan 1334–1615, after patiently trying to balance the accounts on this pivotal historical figure, concludes, “He was a cruel and callous brute.” In 1571, Nobunaga’s forces stormed and utterly razed the Buddhist stronghold of Mount Hiei, a fortified complex of temples and shrines of incomparable artistic value; in the words of a contemporary writer, “The whole mountainside was a great slaughterhouse, and the sight was one of unbearable horror.” At the siege of Nagashima, in 1574, he exterminated the inhabitants of five fortresses, despite repeated offers of surrender. Upon the conquest of Echizen, in 1575, Nobunaga dispatched a letter to Kyoto boasting that the streets were so crammed with corpses there was no room for more. The remaining fugitives, he wrote, must be searched out and killed “yama yama, tani tani”—“on every hill, in every valley.” In his last campaign, against the family of his old enemy Takeda Shingen, he wiped out all the Takeda kin and roasted alive the monks of the temple unfortunate enough to have sheltered Shingen’s remains.

  The narrator of The Signore witnesses some of this horrendous carnage, and reports on the slaughter of the captured servants and children of a general who has defected from Nobunaga’s service, on the burning alive of ten thousand trapped inhabitants of a fortress, on the severed hands of drowned enemies that still cling “stiff and pale as if carved from stone” to the rails of Nobunaga’s fleet. Why does the Signore, with his pallid calm, his high-pitched voice, and his nervously twitching brow, persist in such butchery? Out of perfectionism and rationality, the narrator decides: “Among all the Japanese people I met during my stay in that land, I never knew one who believed as strongly as he that the greatest good was that all things should come about necessarily and reasonably.” He extols the Signore as “a man who possessed a will to seek the limits of perfection in the work he had chosen for himself.” With his own murders in his mind, the narrator goes on, “And it was in precisely this kind of will … that I myself found the only meaning of our life here on this earth.” So austere a conclusion, perhaps, belongs more to a twentieth-century Japanese than to an Italian of the time of the Counter-Reformation; Kunio Tsuji, a Japanese with memories of modern war and Japan’s subsequent indoctrination in the virtues of peace, worries at the riddle of martial morality, giving it a religious tinge when he has the Signore think, “I was unwilling to mar the hallowed rites of battle with acts of kindness.… The only mercy in battle is to be merciless!” After the slaughter at Ishiyama, the Signore dismisses one of his own generals, “the scholarly Lord Sakuma,” for his “humanity and restraint in the final phase of the battle.” The novel quotes the edict, presumably authentic:

  The way of the warrior is not that of others. In a battle … it is incumbent on the commanders—for their sake and for mine—to choose the most opportune moment, then attack with all they have. In this manner, the troops are spared prolonged hardship and struggle. It is the only rational course. But you, with your persistent reluctance and hesitation, have followed a course that can only be judged as thoughtless and unmanly.

  Mercilessness, then, is the swiftest route to merciful peace. The American reader, and presumably the Japanese author, can hardly not think of the two atomic bombs which, in a few blinding moments, killed more noncombatants than Nobunaga’s thirty years of systematic mayhem, but did open the way to surrender and recovery. As the Signore hacks his way through his enemies, peace prettily descends upon Kyoto:

  Relief and happiness could be sensed in every quarter of the city. Ruined houses had been repaired, new ones were under construction, and the lively sound of hammering filled the air. Under the Signore’s tutelage, a police force had been installed, and the watch in each street had been strengthened so that the work of burglars, vandals, and other mischief makers had become unprofitable. Merchants had returned to the boulevards in great numbers, and little theatres and tent shows were again attracting an audience. The women of the pleasure quarters came back from the provinces and could be seen in their bright quimonos, beckoning to customers.

  On the mountainside of Azuchi the victorious Shogun builds his own castle, roofed in blue tile, and magnanimously decrees that the same roofing material be used for the Christian church to be constructed near the castle walls.

  Assuming a Westerner’s point of view, the Japanese novelist identifies with the fate of the precarious but thriving Portuguese Jesuit mission in sixteenth-century Japan, portraying the priestly leaders—Francisco Cabral, Luis Frois, Organtino Gnecchi-Soldi, Alessandro Valignano—and animating with particular warmth another historical Christian, the Japanese Brother Lorenzo, a virtually blind and lame convert who acted as translator and go-between for the missionaries. The murderous, rationalist Nobunaga and his allied daimyos extended to the Jesuits a degree of protection and friendship they would never again enjoy from the rulers of Japan. The reasons are not so paradoxical. The Japanese samurai admired in the Jesuit missionaries an austerity and discipline equivalent to their own. The Portuguese brought with them Europe’s trade and advanced technology, of which the military technology was especially valued—our Italian narrator’s intimacy with the Signore is based upon his expertise in arquebus manufacture and deployment, and in naval design and armor. The infant Christian community, which numbered close to three hundred thousand converts by 1600, at first posed no threat to the established social order, whereas the Buddhist monks and clergy, spearheaded by the militant Hokke sect, were among Nobunaga’s chief enemies. Further, as the novel tells it, the Jesuits fed the Signore’s thirst for rational knowledge and intellectual companionship, whereas the Buddhists were a force for obscurantism and stagnation. The alleged companionship is a bit of a stretch to imagine, and even the mediating device of the soul-searching Italian soldier does not quite make the Signore sympathetic. The sorrow on his “pale, sad visage” is repeatedly mentioned, yet we never feel sorry for him, or believe in him as a kind of Nietzschean superman, a martyr to “the loneliness that came of a determination to test the limits of human existence.” For all the historical blood and struggle it contains, The Signore makes a papery effect not much different from that of Yucatán—fiction at one remove, the characters dimmed by the intervening medium. Kunio Tsuji, coming the long way around by way of a European education and a European point of view, attempts to surprise into life a great name of his national heritage, and produces a stir of old pages.

  As far as news—human activity given the immediacy of personal witness—goes, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters is the richest of our three exotic novels. The Philippines, to be sure, are not exotic to those who live there, and have been no
strangers to our newspapers, from the islands’ pious acquisition by McKinley, through their Japanese occupation and American reconquest in World War II, to the latest headlines concerning disastrous earthquakes, the perils of Corazon Aquino, and the trials of Imelda Marcos. Dogeaters begins in 1956 and ends with the unnamed Marcoses still uneasily in power. Ms. Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines, but has led a vivacious artistic life in the United States, as—the book jacket tells us—“performance artist, poet, and playwright.” The jacket elaborates: “For many years the leader and lyricist for the Gangster Choir band, she is presently a commentator on Crossroads, a syndicated weekly newsmagazine on public radio.” A member of Mr. De Carlo’s generation, she is thoroughly imbued with postwar popular culture, and her characters perceive the world through a scrim of movie memories and radio soap operas and try to act in tune with song lyrics and poignant cinematic poses. In the multicultural welter of impoverished Manila, however, the poses don’t always fit, and the movies, arriving some years later, don’t always make sense. Our young heroine and part-time narrator, Rio Gonzaga, and her bosom (and bosomy) friend and cousin, Pucha Gonzaga, are sometimes puzzled by the American movies of the 1950s: Jane Wyman seems to them too old for Rock Hudson in All That Heaven Allows (it should have been Kim Novak) and they are bewildered and bored by A Place in the Sun (it was “probably too American for us”). Yet some images hit home:

  The back of Montgomery Clift’s shoulder in giant close-up on the movie screen. Elizabeth Taylor’s breathtaking face is turned up toward him, imploring a forbidden kiss. They are drunk with their own beauty and love, that much I understand. Only half of Elizabeth Taylor’s face is visible—one violet eye, one arched black eyebrow framed by her short, glossy black hair. She is glowing, on fire in soft focus.