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http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1130347,00.html
General fiction | John Updike
In praise of cabbage
No one can make magic out of the mundane with the ease of John Updike. Robert Macfarlane follows the development of his vision in The Early Stories 1953-75
Sunday January 25, 2004
The Observer
The Early Stories
The Early Stories 1953-75
by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton ё25, pp838
Introducing this collection of his early stories, John Updike remarks that, as a child of the Thirties, he belongs to the generation of Americans which 'was called Silent'. Silence is not a concept one readily associates with Updike. This is, after all, a man who has published 20 novels, five children's books, six collections of poetry, 11 volumes of short stories, six slabbed books of essays, a play and a memoir; a man who is alleged to have four studies, and to write at an average rate of three pages a day, six remorseless days a week; a man who is to other novelists as the Niagara Falls are to a bath tap.
To be sure, America has a tradition of rapid writers: one thinks of the continuous roll of typewriter paper on to which Kerouac famously blurted On the Road, or Fitzgerald's boast that he conceived of This Side of Paradise in three minutes and wrote it in three months. But Updike is both rapid and prolific, and, unlike Kerouac and Fitzgerald, long-lived. He is, in Martin Amis's memorable phrase, a 'psychotic Santa of volubility'.
What is even more extraordinary than the acreage of Updike's output is his steadiness of vision. Through half a century, Updike's subjects have stayed largely the same. His favoured characters - Henry Bech, Richard Maple, Rabbit Angstrom - are all recognisably versions of himself, and all inhabit the world - Protestant, East Coast American - in which Updike has moved. In one of modern American literature's most sustained and large-scale acts of literary cartography, Updike has, over the course of 50 years, mapped out what he calls 'the terra incognita' of 'small-town space', or what David Foster Wallace, in a notorious 1997 attack on his work, calls 'the solipsist's terrain'.
That mapping began in 1953, when Updike, then 'a married Harvard senior', submitted his first story, 'The Ace in the Hole', to the New Yorker. The Early Stories commute from that point forwards to 1975, by which time Updike was a divorcИe and the New Yorker 's best-known fiction writer. As they have been arranged here, the stories correspond more or less to the advancing stages of Updike's life within those 22 years (student days, early marriage, parenthood, divorce, 'the single life').
One of the book's roles, therefore, is as an opening volume of shadow autobiography, casting Updike's own changing circumstances into the short-story form. It is also, more valuably, a seismograph of literary influence, which registers the jolts and tremors made by the impact of other writers upon Updike's style: Salinger and Hemingway to begin with, then Cheever, Thurber, Chekhov and Nabokov - above all, Nabokov.
Updike observed of Nabokov that his prose 'yearns to clasp diaphanous exactitude into its hairy arms'. It is no bad epigraph for Updike's own celebrated style. His 'only duty' as a writer, as he reminds us in an artfully informal preface to The Early Stories, has been 'to give the mundane its beautiful due'. The rendering of that due goes on in every one of these stories.
An exemplary moment comes in 'Sublimating', where Updike describes - what could be more banal? - a cabbage. Yet, in Updike's hands, the cabbage becomes fetishised into something sacrosanct. His character lingers over its 'pure sphericity, its shy cellar odour, its cannonball heft'. After a slice has been cut 'from one pale cheek' of the cabbage, he 'marvels... at the miracle of the wound, at the tender compaction of the leaves, each tuned to its curve as tightly as a guitar string'.
This is how Updike proceeds, and has always proceeded; gracefully and amply glossing the world for us. The liturgical procession of those phrases, their creed-like succession, might remind us that Updike's worship of the material world is involved with his Protestantism. 'Details are the giant's fingers,' reflects the narrator of one story, and that provocatively opaque phrase suggests the quiet presence of the 'giant' God in Updike's fictional world.
Updike practises, one might say, a sensualist's pantheism, citing the world into a fuller being. His stories are plush with phrasing and, in them, the nap of the felt world made suddenly and wonderfully palpable. Who else would notice the 'clean, sad scent of linoleum', or the 'hoarse olfactory shout' of a football stadium, or the 'sizzle of a defective neon-sign connection'? Who else would have a character opens a door on a summer's day, to find that the 'sunlight falls flat at his feet like a penitent'?
Updike's genius for image-making, however, is his curse as well as his blessing. At times, his lust for detail thickens into the vulgar. In particular, Updike has never been able to leave his genitals alone. A penis cannot be a penis, it must be 'that superadded, boneless bit of him, that monkeyish footnote to the godlike thorax'. Testicles must be 'like dropped fruit, slowly rotting', the vulva a 'sacred several-lipped gateway'.
At moments like these - and there are many of them - we see Updike succumb to the danger which threatens a writer so improbably able at his job: tanked up on success, facility begins to vandalise felicity.
Such relentless image-making also prompts the question of what Updike's fiction is for. Might it be, one reflects at times, nothing more than verbal monosodium glutamate, added to make the world tangier and more palatable? A rebuke to this surmise is offered by the so-called 'Maple Stories', which concern the failing marriage of Richard and Joan Maple. Although they are frustratingly dispersed through the volume, these stories prove that Updike can tear himself away from what one character calls the 'placenta of contentment'. They are rancorously honest and show Updike at his blinkless best, observing the violence which can hatch within a marriage gone stagnant.
In 'Your Lover Just Called', one of the book's finest stories, Richard and Joan confess their recent adulteries to each other. Updike catches the unexpectedness of the confessions, the escalating desire to do hurt, and then - in a passage of arresting brilliance - how suddenly the two have become strangers to one another. 'The Maples are swimming in an aquarium, dark fish in ink, their outlines barely visible, known to each other only as eddies of warmth, as mysterious animate chasms in the surface of space.'
The later Maple stories describe the children's pliant acceptance of the divorce (their agreement so much more agonising than anger would have been), and the marriage's devastating end. ' "Joan, if I could undo it all, I would." "Where would you begin?" she asked. There was no place.'
10.01.2004: Read Ace in the Hole, John Updike's first short story
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