America's 'ideal critic'

Grab bag of Updike essays displays curiosity and talent of two-time Pulitzer-winner

Duane Davis, Special To The Rocky

Friday, November 2, 2007

The author of 22 novels, dozens and dozens of short stories and even a handful of children's books, John Updike is also a prolific essayist and critic. Like many of his earlier books, Updike's ninth collection of nonfiction, Due Considerations, is a grab bag of extended, carefully considered pieces and a sprinkling of very short, very casual odds and ends.

His subjects range from baseball great Ted Williams ("Ted took his time leaving this world, and he's not quite out of it yet. He is cryonically frozen in Arizona, drained of blood and upside down but pretty much intact, waiting for whatever resurrection technology can eventually produce.") to the highbrow cartoonist Saul Steinberg ("To call these inventions 'visual puns' is to make them sound slighter than they are; they are wormholes between different universes that are simultaneously contiguous and parsecs apart. He created for himself a unique niche between high art and commercial cartooning . . . ").

Whatever the subject, Updike has a hard time being boring about almost anything he turns his attention to. With his pack-rat curiosity, his bright, beady, magpie eye for detail, his prodigious memory and attendant knack for choosing the "just-right" fact or quote, and his ever- present astonishment at both the stupidity and genius on display wherever he looks, Updike is in many ways an ideal critic.

For example, while we might expect Updike to be good on other fiction writers (he did, after all, receive two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels), it's a little surprising to find him writing so well on someone like 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. But he does just that, mining a huge, 867-page biography of this eccentric, God-ridden forerunner of existentialism by a professor "at the Soren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen" for a review that manages to recognize the absurd scale of the biography:

"In the years of the great Dane's short and not entirely unhappy life," Updike writes, Copenhagen "numbered fewer than one hundred twenty-five thousand residents - one resident for every three of this exhaustive tome's nearly four hundred thousand words."

(And, yes, I'm quite sure the play on the phrase "great Dane," with its glances at both the introspective Hamlet and that bristling Big Dog, is intentional.)

At the same time, Updike can pry the kernel out of this seemingly outsize shell: Kierke- gaard's theories, he writes, forced Christians to confront "the drastic otherness and unaccountability of God, on the far side of a leap of faith unaided by reason and propelled by human dread and despair."

You'll find this same incisiveness almost anywhere you care to look in these pages. One of my favorite threads in the book has to do with literary biography. In fact, Updike opens the book with On Literary Biography, an essay in which he voices his misgivings of such efforts: "The main question concerning literary biography is, surely, Why do we need it at all?"

He finds our motives for rummaging through the dirty laundry of people we don't know rather suspicious: "I raise the possibility that we resent a fiction writer's manipulation of his private life, including the private lives of those around him, and rejoice when he or she loses control of what is to be revealed."

Part of the fun here is the highhandedness we glimpse behind the screen of thought: Updike, who is himself superb at sorting out other people's laundry, wants his own undies kept safely in the hamper and out of sight.

Yet Updike seems drawn to these very compendiums. And thus we find that some of the most interesting work here concerns biography - literary biography, at that.

It's fascinating, for example, to read Updike's reviews of a couple of huge biographies of two novelists fast slipping out of the current zeitgeist: Sinclair Lewis and John O'Hara. The essays are notable for their élan, but also for the prickly defensiveness that seems to boil just beneath the surface.

Both pieces, for instance, begin with similar complaints: "What has Sinclair Lewis done lately to deserve a new, 554-page (plus notes and index) biography?" and, "What has moved Geoffrey Wolff, author of six novels and two previous biographies, to write a life of John O'Hara?"

What seems to get Updike's dander up is that both Lewis and O'Hara, like Updike himself, are "realists" who set themselves to describing the world they grew up in and lived in, and that once that moment has passed, it's possible the writer's moment has passed as well: "It is the conflicting fate of an American artist to long for profundity while suspecting that, most profoundly, none exists."

But this is just one thread in a remarkably varied tapestry. The book is divided into 15 unequal sections, some of great weight - the section comprising mostly introductions Updike wrote for new editions of such classic writers as Hawthorne, Thoreau and Henry James, for example.

Elsewhere, in chapters titled Tributes and Short Takes and General Considerations, he stuffs the many occasional pieces a writer of his fame and prestige is often asked to provide to various publications.

Updike mostly has fun with these and touches on everything from My Life in Poker to the aforementioned essay on baseball great Williams (written for The New York Times Magazine in a round-up of those who died in 2002).

Most of us will probably never have a chance to sit down with this man and have a cup of coffee and talk about the weather or baseball. But as long as we can hold a book like this in our hands, we can participate in that strange and remarkable conversation that exists between an author and a reader.

In Due Considerations, it is a privilege to be in the company of this wonderfully American voice.

As for his fiction . . .

Updike's four Rabbit novels, featuring protagonist Rabbit Angstrom, were included on The New York Times Book Review's 2006 list of the most important fiction of the past 25 years.

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism

• By John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf, $40.

• Grade: A

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.