Short Stories: This mighty tome, as big as two bricks in a paper bag, represents but a fragment of John Updike's output since he first began to publish fiction in the New Yorker when he was, or so it seems now, still in short pants.
In terms both of productivity and of quality he is a phenomenon. From the start he was incapable of writing a wholly bad sentence. His ability to capture the look, the feel, the very taste of the world, specifically his native American world, has never flagged over the 50 years of his writing career. In speaking of his style one cannot avoid the tired cliché about a writer with a painter's eye - he spent a year studying drawing and fine art in Oxford in the mid-1950s, and it shows - for who else among his peers has managed to portray the American scene over the past half-century with such precision, colour, and opulence?
A critic has remarked that Updike is an oddity in that he is a major novelist who has not written a major novel - although the Rabbit trilogy comes very close. He has simply been too busy to bother going for the Big One, content instead to follow the fluency of his gift. Despite the gorgeousness of the Updike style there is at the heart of his work an essential humility. In an afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov spoke, with his accustomed lack of humility, of how in that book he had set himself the task of inventing America; Updike has settled for conjuring up a smaller slice of the continent, roughly that acute triangle formed by Boston, New York and his native Pennsylvania - but what a job he has done of it.
While Nabokov could not entirely lose his European accent, Updike the native son never, or hardly ever, puts a word wrong. Even when he ventures outside the WASP milieu he knows so well, as he does in the stories based on his two sojourns in England, for instance, or the ones about his fictional Jewish writer Henry Bech, the tone is confident and sure. America, however, is his true subject, and he never really leaves home, even in works such as The Coup, his novel set in Africa. In a story from 1972, significantly titled 'How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time', a Nabokovian tour of the quintessential sites and sights of his native land - "Arrive in some town around three, having been on the road since seven, and cruise the main street, which is also Route Whatever-It-Is, and vote on the motel you want" - he states his by now famous credo: "America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy".
In his love of homeland Updike is surely unique among contemporary American writers. Even at the height of the Vietnam war he refused to hate America - he had sympathy for Richard Nixon, for heaven's sake! - and cast a sardonic eye on the liberal posturings of a loud minority. In 'Marching through Boston', one of the Maple stories, written in 1965, reactionary Richard Maple is persuaded by his activist wife Joan to accompany her on a civil rights protest, after which, as the couple drive homeward, he lets loose a rant against Martin Luther King and his followers, whose rhetoric he condemns as "corny and forced".
"And that Abernathy. God, if he's John the Baptist, I'm Herod the Great. 'Onteel the Frenchman go back t'France, onteel the Ahrishman go back t'Ahrland, onteel de Mexican, he go back tuh -' "
"Stop it."
"Don't get me wrong. I didn't mind them sounding like demagogues; what I minded was that god-awful boring phony imitation of a revival meeting. 'Thass right, yossuh. Yos-suh!'."
"Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn't you stop using it?"
Another writer might discreetly have dropped the story, or at least toned it down, but as in his decision to retain "Negro" and "fairy" against the more acceptable "black" and "gay", Updike is not about to censor, or censure, a version of himself unafraid to air his views, however unfashionable, then or now. In his foreword to the collection he does confess however to a certain artistic tidying up: "In general, I reread these stories without looking for trouble, but where an opportunity to help my younger self leapt out at me, I took it, deleting an adjective here, adding a clarifying phrase there".
The calm confidence evinced in this foreword is startling. In early old age Updike regards his oeuvre with the comfortable satisfaction of a man looking back over a life in which more was achieved than his youthful self would have expected, or even thought possible. Indicating at the outset that this is a collection, not a selection - it contains 103 stories - he states his case with remarkable insouciance: "Any story that makes it from the initial hurried scribbles into the haven of print possesses, in this writer's eyes, a certain valor, and my instinct, even 40 years later, is not to ditch it but to polish and mount it anew". This accommodating fondness for early work will amaze most fiction writers. Poets can love their early efforts - in not a few instances those pieces will be their best - but prose goes off quickly. Of the vast body of stories Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975, he chose to drop only two, because they "trembled insecurely on the edge of topical humor, and felt dated". Hubris? Certainly this ungainly volume could have gained by being slimmed.
A writer as lavishly gifted as Updike may perhaps be allowed such a paternal, a well-nigh uxorious, cherishing of his own work, so high has been the quality of it from the very first published story, Ace in the Hole (in which we meet an early but already fully formed version of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, masquerading under the name Fred "Ace" Peterson). There is such good writing here, in story after story, that the reader bounces along on it like a child tobogganing down a glistening, sunny slope, often forgetting, lost in the sheer bliss of the ride, that the snow under the runners is made up of countless tiny, unique, intricate and perfectly fashioned flakes. The writing is so consistently good, indeed, that one has to ask, why isn't it consistently great? Is it that there is just too much of it, so that the reader feels glutted on goodies? Or is it that it all seems too easy, too pleased with its own smooth loveliness? W.B. Yeats's father once gave the poet a sound piece of advice: an artist, the old man wrote, should have a great facility, and never use it.
Yet it would be unjust as well as churlish to characterise these stories, any of them, as merely facile. Put in a thumb on almost any page and a plum, burnished and brimful of juice, will come sliding out. In their London lodgings, a young American couple try to cope with the English climate: ". . . in the morning, dressing, my wife and I skipped in and out of the radiant influence of the electric heater like a nymph and satyr competing at a shrine"; a fond father notices how "the forearms of teenage girls tapered amazingly, toward little cages of bird-bones"; in 'Crow in the Woods', a masterpiece of pure style, "the clock on the gray marble mantel stat\ the precipitate hour with golden hands whose threadlike fineness itself seem\ a kind of pointed tact". And here is the fond father again, this time observing his wife and her mother, with merciless candour:
Like her own mother, big Jane held a cigarette in the left corner of her mouth. Her left eye fluttered against the smoke. Lee's mother-in-law was shorter than his wife, paler, more sarcastic - very different, he had thought. But this habit was hers right down to the tilt of the cigarette and the droop of the neglected ash. Looking, Lee saw that, as Jane squinted, the white skin at the outside corner of her eye crinkled finely, as dry as her mother's, and that his wife's lids were touched with the lashless, grainy, desexed quality of the lids of the middle-aged woman he had met not a dozen times, mostly in Indianapolis, where she kept a huge brick house spotlessly clean and sipped vermouth from breakfast to bed. All unknowing he had married her.
One of Updike's admirable traits as a writer is his patience, his refusal to hurry the story along to a pat conclusion - although some of the earliest pieces do end with an O. Henryish thud - or to nudge the reader into accepting an opinion or even a point of view. In this he is every inch the American democrat, a "poet of ordinary days", as John Dewey said of Emerson. The thing about the ordinary, however, is that frequently it is just that: ordinary, not in itself, perhaps, for anything can be a wonder, but in our blurred, impatient, resentful perception of it. In his foreword, Updike states it as his aim "to give the mundane its beautiful due", but the fact is he simply cannot let the mundane alone. He is an ecstatic witness, as breathlessly enthusiastic as the children he so wonderfully portrays; for him the lachrymae rerum are a multi- faceted prism through which the world shines with an otherworldly, shimmering splendour.
Updike has always been an autobiographical writer - he has written of the pleasure he derives from taking things raw from life and polishing them into fiction - and the stories in this volume are organised in such a way that, read consecutively, they give what seems an impressively full and rounded account of the life, from youth to middle age, of a particular middle-class American male who might well be John Updike. As one reads these pages one has the dizzying sense of flicking through a family photograph album so fast that the figures move: these grandparents, parents, wives, mistresses, children, family pets, all different and all the same, so that one has to keep reminding oneself that this is fiction.
The best stories are those that trace the fracturing and final disintegration of the Maples' marriage. Updike has a wonderful gift for the hot, fraught, shameful poetry of adultery and its consequences. In the foreword he pays rueful tribute to his first wife - "Perhaps I could have made a go of the literary business without \ faith, forbearance, sensitivity and good sense, but I cannot imagine how" - and it is surely not by chance that the final sentence in the book is: "She had become his wife."
In this collection, 'Separating', a record of Richard Maple's final day at home before he leaves to live with his lover and future wife, is simply a masterpiece, in which the collapse of something essential in American life that occurred somewhere between the mid-1950s and the "me-decade" of the 1970s is mirrored by the break-up of a suburban marriage. Here is Richard contemplating the tennis court in the garden that used to be his:
Years ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a dramatic home improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own previous worst crisis had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen renovation. Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their marriage could rend the earth for fun.
But the fun is now over, brought to an untimely end by the secret assassin hidden on that grassy, daisy-dotted knoll.
• John Banville's most recent book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published last year by Bloomsbury