John Updike (1932–2009)

In Roger’s Version, his eleventh novel, published in 1986, John Updike tells the sorry, sexually charged tale of faith-challenged Roger Lambert, 52: disgraced Methodist minister, now a theology professor at a university in an unnamed city on the northeast coast of the US. One day a young man shows up in his office with an unusual request. Dale Kohler, a computer science student, is, paradoxically, engaged in faith-based research. His examination of data gleaned from studies in a number of show more areas—number theory, geology, astronomy—as well as his own theological readings, has convinced him that the circumstances resulting in life on earth and culminating in the creation of man could never have come about through a natural process and could only have resulted from the deliberate intervention of a supreme being. He senses that he is close to discovering a mathematical proof that god exists and wants Roger to use his influence to help him secure a grant from the divinity school to support him in his efforts. Roger, who regards Dale’s research as presumptuous, futile and hilariously misguided, is initially dismissive. But he eventually allows himself to be persuaded, not because of any change of heart, but because he’s offended by Dale’s exacting and righteous piety and voicing support for the young man’s project presents him with a perfect opportunity to express his cynicism. Dale is acquainted with Verna, the disgraced 19-year-old daughter of Roger’s half-sister Edna. It was Verna who directed Dale to Roger’s office. Edna lives in Cleveland. Verna’s move east was precipitated by her giving birth to a baby (mix-raced), the father of whom is nowhere in sight, and subsequently getting kicked out of home. Roger lives in an elite neighbourhood with his tiny perfect wife Esther, thirteen years his junior (many years previously Roger’s affair with Esther resulted in the loss of his ministry and the collapse of his first marriage), and ten-year-old son Richie. But Roger and Esther’s marriage is strained: the two hardly communicate and are no longer physically intimate. The bulk of the novel is devoted to chronicling the interlocking relationships that spring up among this cast of characters. Dale, introduced into the Lambert household at Esther’s behest, is hired to tutor Richie in mathematics. Roger, deciding to play the dutiful, caring uncle, visits Verna in her threadbare, crumbling, rent-subsidy apartment in the projects. There, he meets the infant Paula, tries to persuade Verna to obtain her high school equivalency, and is subject to Verna’s brazen and titillating flirtatious overtures. Verna, frustrated by her straitened circumstances, immature, irresponsible, and suffering from a severe case of low self-esteem, sees little value in herself except as an object of male sexual desire. She is short-tempered and often cruel to her daughter. When she finds that she’s pregnant again, she turns to Roger to help her through the ordeal. In the meantime, Esther seduces Dale and the two embark on a lurid affair. Large swaths of narrative are given over to Roger’s contemplation of inscrutable theological puzzles and Dale’s obsessive exertions at the university’s mainframe, crunching numbers and seeking a glimpse of god’s face in the printouts that his calculations generate. The prose, as one expects of Updike, is assured, lyrical, endlessly inventive, and crammed with vivid imagery and surprising but appropriate and memorable turns of phrase. This is Updike in virtuoso mode. After much emotional strife and numerous betrayals, the story reaches an ambiguous conclusion, with Dale’s research project at an impasse and Roger and Esther assuming greater responsibility for Paula’s care, but nowhere near a rapprochement. For all the questions it raises about faith and reason and man’s place in the universe, Roger’s Version declines to deliver anything close to a definitive pronouncement. Like Updike’s characters, we are left to our own devices, to grope our way toward truth and meaning as best we can. show less

Suburbia is boring.

Well, at least, in John Updike’s hands it is boring.

What we have within Trust Me is a collection of upper-middle-class people (I think that is the correct classification) who have nothing to complain about, yet find ways to complain. And that complaining is generally reflected in their choices – choices that show a disinterest in their own lives. (Which raises the question, if they are not interested, why should I be?) Multiple marriages, affairs, divorces, bratty show more children, boring children – yawn, life goes on for the poor, downtrodden happy-lifers.

I would like to argue that this disconnect is a function of how time has taken its toll on the effectiveness of these stories. But a quick glance at the publication date shows that many of these stories are set in the 80s, yet they all feel as if they are set in the 60’s and 70’. The content and themes become a rehashing of old concepts that really don’t matter anymore.

Let me note that I am a fan of Updike’s. The Rabbit novels, as one example, are excellent. However, this collection…not so much. It is a collection of stories about people I just don’t care about. They are boring, they are tedious, they are narcissistic, they are just not worth my time. In different stories, in different hands, maybe I could have cared. But Updike’s style leaves no impression but their underserved ennui.

It may not be popular to pick on a writer of Updike’s stature, and maybe I am missing something, or maybe this is not representative of his best, but it is not worth my time to be bored by boring people. show less

The first 40 pages or so of this book are probably the worst 40 pages I've read since Austerlitz, which was so bad that I couldn't be bothered finishing it. Never before or since in the history of English language literature, or at least since Euphues, has an author so irritably reached after effect for no good reason.

"The Norway maples exhale the smell of their sticky new buds and the broad living-room windows along Wilbur Street show beyond the silver patch of a television set the warm show more bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves." Yes, this aptly likens modern living to pre-historic living. But trees do not exhale; what colour other than silver would a television set be in the '50s?; what sort of a bulb (or anything else, for that matter) burns any way other than warmly?

"He had wondered what he was doing. But now these reflexes, shallowly scratched, are spent, and deeper instincts flood forward, telling him he is right. He feels freedom like oxygen everywhere around him... he adjusts his necktie with infinite attention, as if the little lines of this juncture of the Windsor knot, the collar of Tothero's shirt, and the base of his own throat were the arms of a star that will, when he is finished, extend outward to the rim of the universe. He is the Dalai Lama." Yes, this is faintly satirical. Yes, it's meant to show us the stupidity of Rabbit, and it does. But on the way it shows the incompetence of the narrator. What sort of a scratch is otherwise than shallow? Who 'feels' oxygen around them (air, maybe, but not unless it's particularly windy)? And clearly the simile at the end is *not* in Rabbit's head, so we can only blame Updike for seeing the universe in a tie-knot. Don't even get me started on the gobsmackingly ugly use of alliteration and assonance: scratched are spent; flood forward; feels freedom; infinite attention; little lines; will when he is finished; extend outward. That's in *half a paragraph*. And approximately 50% of the book is written in this 'style.'

And you'll be able to find your own examples, too. Here are some brief ones at random from page 86: "three long nicks, here, scratched in the wall, parallel". *Long* nicks? "the pork chops... cold as death, riding congealed grease" riding to where? what's wrong with 'sitting on'? "he takes clean Jockey pants, T-shirts and socks from a drawer" Do *you* keep your dirty underwear in your drawers? "the furniture, carpeting, wallpaper all seem darkly glazed with the murk filming his own face" Would they be transparently glazed with murk?

Thankfully, in the other half, when Updike isn't meditating his way into ecstasy over misplaced adjectives, excessive adjectives, superfluous adverbs, reified adjectives, and pointless, uninformative lists ("on the bureau there is a square glass ashtray and a pair of fingernail scissors and a spool of white thread and a needle and some hairpins and a telephone book and a Baby Ben with luminous members and a recipe she never used torn from a magazine and a necklace made of sandalwood beads carved in Java he got her for Christmas") characters actually speak to each other and display the characteristics we generally associate with human beings.

This is all the more difficult for me to cope with because the moral of the story - running away from your responsibilities is an awful thing to do and will have terrible consequences on those who care for you, and even those who don't really - needs to be said in novels more often than it is by good writers these days (and by 'these days' I mean the twentieth century). But it has to be said better than this, for goodness' sake. I really hope Rabbit, Redux has less rapture over the everyday. Please. Please. show less

Did I want to read Updike? I had a group who read him this month, and I had never read Updike before. So, I got myself excited to join. He can do prose, and he can drive a story.

John Updike turned 28 the year he published Rabbit, Run, his second novel, and first of his famous Rabbit quartet, each book from another decade. Updike had a short story collection and a well-regarded poetry collection already published. But Rabbit, oh Rabbit. Oh, fragile manhood. Rabbit is the star high school show more basketball player who doesn't know how to move on. He wants to keep playing. But he's married with a son and baby on the way. But Rabbit is impulsive, and only impulsive. He runs, or drives, and comes back again, and then what.

Why does anyone care about Rabbit? Well, first the prose is quite elegant, with alliterative sentences quietly and unobtrusively scattered in descriptions of suburbia, highways, bars and gardens. And second because he's exciting, and Updike ramps up the pace and intensity. Also, he's endearing, because he loves everyone and means it, at least in the moment. And it's either beautiful or entertaining. But mostly because we watch this wrecking ball swing in a state of horror-fascination. Can I call it gleeful horror? Sure, we must wonder why Rabbit runs. What's driving him? His manhood, his impulsiveness, his stodgy surroundings? Is Rabbit another rebel without a cause, or perhaps with one? (Updike has said he's partially modeled on Jack Kerouac). But also, 1950's comforts are no match for Rabbit's deeper impulse.

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Addendum: As Rabbit drove the Pennsylvania highways, abandoning his wife without saying anything, the parallel with a novel that came out this year, The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits, was wonderfully apparent. Markovits, who played professional basketball, wrote a homage, or perhaps an updated take on our confused concepts of masculinity. show less