I wonder if John Updike would be published, were he starting out now. On the basis of one short story and a bit of one of his novels, this reader believes he's worth ditching from the canon on the charge of misogyny - and there are plenty of others who have appeared over the last decade or so as witnesses for the prosecution in that regard.
Finding women so attractive that you keep being unfaithful to other women - as Updike seems to have done a lot in his early adulthood ("I was a passionate creature in those years, with surges of desire shaking my bones" one of his elderly characters in this collection observes, looking back at his younger self) - is, I suppose, a kind of misogyny, although not a straightforward one. Whatever kind it is or isn't, I don't think it makes any difference to whether Updike's writing is bad or good - but I don't read fiction in order to think, "Hurray, this writer thinks exactly like me".
What I read Updike for is his wonderfully meticulous descriptions, the notice he takes and the care he then goes to in order to create for his readers a small world, a few characters. If all the photographs of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties are digitised and then vanish due to digital wastage or a permanent outage of electricity, we will still be able to find, in Updike's evocations of the America he lived in, perfect snapshots of that part of our past.
The Afterlife and Other Stories is a collection that seems to have been written when Updike was beginning to feel "the ineluctable logic of decay tightening its grip on his body", so that "the headlines in the paper ... seemed directed at somebody else, like the new movies and television specials and pennant races and beer commercials - somebody younger and more easily excited, somebody for whom the world still had weight". The stories mainly concern middle class people in the middle of their lives. Some are still married, some newly divorced, some alone, some in uncomfortable second marriages. Most of the protagonists are increasingly aware that death is approaching.
A recurring theme is a complicated relationship with a mother who remains a difficult, yet intimately connected, figure, a woman who irritates but can share with the protagonist, "the vanished texture of the world she had brought him to life within, a world of glamorous drugstores, with marble counter tops, and movie houses that were exotic islands of air-conditioning, with paper icicles dripping from the marquee," or who, if she has already died, has left her son "the sole custodian of hundreds of small mental pictures...of a specialised semiotics, a thousand tiny nuanced understandings of her, a once commonplace language of which he was now the surviving speaker."
The stories tell of the awkwardness of visiting neighbourhood friends who have reinvented themselves elsewhere, of the uncomfortable intimacy of ill-matched couples holidaying far from home without children or other people, of a mother's obsession with a farmhouse, of the rise and fall of a community recorder orchestra and various other things. Mostly they are mesmerising in the clarity of their description and the attention Updike pays to the protagonists and their mysteriously shifting moods. Interspersed through the book are some lighter pieces, most notably one about a Scottish caddy, which beguiled me, even though when I began it I fretted, because I wanted more of the usual quiet insight I'd come to expect.
I am reading a lot of Updike at the moment. In another book, he talks of his jet-lagged insomnia during a trip to Finland. In this collection, in a story called Falling Asleep Up North, he provides one of the most accurate descriptions of insomnia I've ever come across. Reading it as an insomniac, I was grateful to discover that I am not isolated in my, until now rather lonely, inability to sleep:
"Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, one's bed partner twitching, or the prematurely jubilant realisation I'm falling asleep. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams' uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. Circling in the cell of wakefulness, it panics at the poverty of its domain - these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word-games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow, which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous."
For me, reading Updike is like being with a companion who describes what he sees and feels with such care and precision that I am able to pay more attention to my own surroundings and to see more sharply and perhaps with greater wisdom what being a human is. His work is reassuring and also inspiring - his close observation of life and his subsequent ability to turn what he has observed into sentences full of bright, clearcut images deserves nothing but praise.
