Updike Redux

The discount bookseller Hamilton is one of my go-to sites for perusing titles for possible purchase. More often than not I’ll toss something in the virtual shopping cart. Recently two by John Updike (1932-2009) caught my eye: his 1992 Memories of the Ford Administration and 1994 Brazil. I wasn’t looking for (or expecting) signed hardcover private editions but those are what arrived – apparently publisher’s surplus.
 
I first read Updike in high school in the 1968-69 school year. The English teacher Mr. Drew (a former monk and well-educated eccentric) mixed books by contemporary authors in with classics on the class reading list just to make the point that literature was still a flourishing art form. John Updike was youngish (36) and still considered up-and-coming at the time. So, for one of our assignments, Mr. Drew chose Updikes’s Rabbit Run, a novel about 26-y.o. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom whose dull marriage and duller job don’t measure up to his glory days as a high school athlete. As a student I found the book painless enough that I bought and read the sequel Rabbit Redux (1971) just for recreational reading despite my already hefty reading list at college. The four Rabbit novels written between 1960 and 1990 capture their times consummately as well as one man’s stages of life. Yet, in a general way they made me not so much an avid fan of Updike as a lukewarm fan – but a fan nonetheless. I fully understand Gore Vidal's remarks that Updike is an accomplished writer but that he wasn’t particularly interested in the man’s preferred subject matters and suburban protagonists. Updike does get more adventurous in his plots occasionally, as in The Witches of Eastwick and The Coup, but suburbs in his native Pennsylvania or adopted New England are indeed his most likely settings. The two books from Hamilton, however, were a step up from an already pretty high level.

In PA just west of Delaware River. I'm guessing
the novel by native son Updike came first and
the street second, but maybe not.

 

By fits and starts from the mid-1950s Updike worked on a historical novel about James Buchanan, the only President from Pennsylvania. Buchanan is also, by most historians’ reckoning, the worst President ever for failing to avoid the Civil War when a show of force might have prevented it, since even in South Carolina there was at the outset substantial Unionist sentiment. He took the curious view that states had no authority to secede but that the federal government had no authority to stop them, so he just wagged a finger and let secession happen. Most of today’s general public have forgotten Buchanan altogether. The novel didn’t come together for Updike for more than three decades. At last he hit on the solution of removing himself a couple steps from the subject matter by making the novel about a Professor Alf Clayton writing about the Ford Administration (another widely forgotten Presidency) while simultaneously writing a biography of Buchanan. This also allowed Updike to use a more deeply literary style than he usually employs since we expect a professor to write in professor-ese. Accordingly, the novel is every bit as much about the 1970s as the 1850s – as well as life as a New Hampshire college professor. It is worth a read on all three of its levels.
 
A greater departure from Updike’s usual fare is Brazil, which deserves a big thumbs up. Set (mostly) in the 1960s during the era of military rule, the Brazil of Updike’s novel is part starkly realistic and part sensual magical fantasy. The plot is basically Tristan and Isolde featuring wealthy families and slum dwellers instead of courts and commoners. In case there is any doubt about this, the protagonists are named Tristao and Isabel. A country that then (as now) prided itself on being colorblind, Brazil really wasn’t (isn’t) though the more thorough blending of the population makes the matter far more nuanced than in North America. This adds a crucial dimension to class differences in the tale.
 
The millennium-old story of Tristan and Isolde has numerous permutations, blending with Arthurian legends in England while taking other directions on the continent. All of them, though, up to and including Wagner’s over-the-top opera, are about a love supreme that survives suppression, violence, kidnapping, betrayal on various levels (including of each other at least superficially), escape, recapture, romance and bromance. All of that is in Brazil, forcing one to ask, “Why are the two lovers putting themselves through this brutal punishment? It can’t be worth it. Split up already.” The key is in Isabel’s realization during some of the worst of it that she is happy. The mutual willingness to endure punishment proves to her a love that illumines their lives in an otherwise meaningless world.
 
It is a strangely masochistic vision, but one that may be all too relatable. How many of us have experienced a self-destructive relationship and delayed far too long an escape from it? (I’m raising a hand high here.) If that is, we did escape. There is much to be said for being kinder to oneself – for living a calmer life in a softer light. If we don’t get a novel out it, much less an opera, so be it.
 
 

Paul McCartney - Back In Brazil