See What Can Be Done Page 20
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“The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” is this collection’s first literary glimpse of New York, a city Updike himself had always hoped to live in but, once settled there, sought refuge from in search of the ordinary life he needed for material and peace. This he found not in the small-town Pennsylvania of his boyhood but in suburban Massachusetts. New York was too “full of other writers and of cultural hassle, and the word game [was] overrun with agents and wisenheimers,” he writes in his foreword. “Agents and wisenheimers,” mused a literary friend of mine mischievously. “Is that Shillington, Pennsylvania, for ‘Hymietown’?” No, I decided, just the headlong candor of the foreword, and a defensiveness regarding provincial shelter. Also, Updike writes, he wanted “free parking for my car, and public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.”
Such would have been the necessary camouflage and freedom for the kind of stories Updike has collected here, with their felt kernel of felt life. A Latvian man recently spoke to me of how meaningful Updike’s work was to him when he initially discovered it. “For the first time,” he said, “I believed I was reading something by a fiction writer who wasn’t making things up.” This assumption that his fiction is autobiographical may be wearying and philistine to someone such as Updike, though also familiar and anticipated; it is one of the hazards of realism and looked at the right way is a compliment of the profoundest sort.
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The section “Married Life” involves the restive state of that institution, or at least of its inmates—a subject Updike has returned to throughout the decades of these stories. Adultery, the conquered citizen’s silent revolt, is already having its secret meetings in Updike’s living rooms and cars, though he leaves the tales of actual divorce for the latter part of The Early Stories. Updike’s husbands are here beginning their condition of bruised pre-exile within their marriages. The Jack of both “Walter Briggs” and “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?,” two stories in which the father’s storytelling to his child figures prominently in the carpet (“Tomorrow,” says the little girl, “I want you to tell me the story that that wizard took that magic wand and hit that mommy”), sees the woodwork of his house as “a cage of moldings and rails and baseboards all around them.” In “Unstuck,” the young husband, wanting to share his Christian faith with his wife, finds himself wincing at her cavalier remarks, “feeling himself to blame. If he had given her a climax, she wouldn’t be so irreligious,” he imagines. Later, on his way out, “he noticed a steaming cup of coffee she had poured for him, like one of those little caches one explorer leaves behind for another. To appease her, he took two scalding swallows before heading out into the wilderness of his brilliant back yard.”
It is Richard and Joan Maple, Updike’s famously falling-apart couple, who most explicitly and with chilling authenticity express domestic antagonism at its most distilled, and the best stories about them are included here. Their conversations—sparring, ruthless, accusing—“had the final effect of knitting them ever tighter together in a painful, helpless, degrading intimacy.” Updike’s dialogue possesses, often, the feeling of transcripts, full of the dangerous currents of marital strife, and one imagines one feels the life-jolts that prompted them. “Let’s not talk,” says Joan Maple to her husband in “Giving Blood.” But his criticism—of her smugness, of her unsexiness, of her stupidity—continues. “I asked you not to talk,” Joan said. “Now you’ve said things that I’ll never forget.”
But the marriage is sustained by their forgiving lovemaking. “When their tongues at last fell silent, their bodies collapsed together as two mute armies might gratefully mingle, released from the absurd hostilities decreed by two mad kings.” In “Twin Beds in Rome,” the Colosseum itself is “shaped like a shattered wedding cake.” In Rome, Richard Maple manages his deep irritation with “simultaneous doses of honey and gall.” “You’re such a nice woman,” Richard tells his wife. “I can’t understand why I’m so miserable with you.” In this “city of steps” they finally separate, not physically or legally, but in every other way. The marriage lets go “like an overgrown vine whose half-hidden stem has been slashed in the dawn by an ancient gardener.” (“The stripped and shapely / Maple grieves / The loss of her departed leaves,” wrote Updike in the November poem of his A Child’s Calendar.) Back in Boston, Joan Maple becomes involved with the civil rights movement (“Marching Through Boston”). Her self-sufficiency seems to her husband to mock as well as to reengage him, and he finds he can neither let go of her nor love her.
Although he joins her in a political march, out of sheer marital perversity—irritation again—he mimics the “Negroes” shockingly. (It is both stubborn and correct that Updike has decided not to update his terminology for this collection. Some of the locutions, however true to their period, are so interestingly antique now that their meanings are not always instantly clear. When, for instance, one of his characters walks into a roomful of “fairies,” this reader, for a moment seeing wings and wands, had no idea where we were.)
“Family Life” continues, including two additional Maple stories, “Sublimating” and “Eros Rampant,” with thematizing titles. One more comically squabbling one, “Your Lover Just Called,” is placed in “Tarbox Tales.” In its climactic outburst, we see a whole segment of the Tarbox community as well as a moment of American social history helplessly summed up:
“Go to her!” Joan suddenly cried, with a burst of the same defiant energy that made her, on other hungover mornings, rush through a mountain of housework. “Go to her like a man and stop trying to maneuver me into something I don’t understand! I have no lover! I let Mack kiss me because he’s lonely and drunk! Stop trying to make me more interesting than I am! All I am is a beat-up housewife who wants to go play tennis with some other exhausted ladies!”
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The tales of Tarbox—a town founded “by men fearful of attack”—follow an unanchored interlude of stories about loneliness and romantic paralysis (“The Two Iseults”), and precede the group of stories labeled “Far Out,” which, proving Cole Porter right (birds do do it), includes the sexual romps of prehistoric animals (“During the Jurassic”)—“Next came the allosaurus, a carnivorous bachelor whose dangerous aura and needled grin excited the female herbivores”—and various protozoa (“Under the Microscope”), though without Updike’s original illustrations as they first appeared in The Transatlantic Review. These satirical stories (Updike once worked on The Harvard Lampoon) are narrated as the supposed cocktail parties of the doomed and are hilarious, inspired, and frothily bleak:
The party was thinning….Out of mercy as much as appetite, he ate her. She felt prickly inside him. Hurriedly—the rooms were almost depleted, it was late—he sought his hostess. She was by the doorway, her antennae frazzled from waving goodbye, but still magnificent….“Don’t go,” she commanded, expanding. “I have a minuscule favor to ask. Now that my children, all thirteen million of them, thank God, are off at school, I’ve taken a part-time editing job, and my first real break is this manuscript I’d be so grateful to have you read and comment on.”
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The ultimate section, “The Single Life,” contains the most famous Maple stories and the book’s climax, the sorrowing “Separating” and “Gesturing.” (The Maples are largely in a gerund state.) These stories are powerful with or without their predecessors. In them the Maples separate, openly take lovers, tell the children, divorce. And here, too, is the most affecting and trenchant toast to the first wife:
He saw through her words to what she was saying—that these lovers, however we love them, are not us, are not sacred as reality is sacred. We are reality. We have made children. We gave each other our young bodies. We promised to grow old together.
Everything and everyone else is jus
t shadow play, gesturing, an echo, unreal.
“Isn’t it amazing,” Joan says at the end, in what is one of the most unexpectedly haunting and improbably perfect lines of the book, “how a full bottle of wine isn’t enough for two people any more?”
Updike’s storied and nuanced sense of the friendship between husbands and wives is a generous and complex one, and rewards each return visit he makes. Ordinary friendship (a subject ironically central to the work of the deeply Updike-influenced Ann Beattie) is largely missing in his fictional world; a dearth of this subject might be considered to constrict the otherwise wide and encompassing lens of this collection. But then these are just the early stories. There are the beautiful “middle stories” presumably to come—“A Sandstone Farmhouse,” “The Cats,” to name only two, in which the mother’s abiding and muse-like friendship persists beyond the grave. As for the “late stories”? Let no living writer this distinguished be thought to have written them yet. May David Kern’s lavishing God and the second wife assist.
(2003)
Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint
Whatever serious subject the novelist Nicholson Baker explores, we must never forget that he is also being at least a little funny. Fond of the brisk, improvisatory miniature and heir to the cerebral comedy of Donald Barthelme, he still can seem a little misunderstood by those who would read any of his fiction as a grinding ax. Baker is not, as Leon Wieseltier suggested recently in a review of Baker’s new novel, Checkpoint, in The New York Times Book Review, an attention seeker, participating in “the politics of the sewer.” (Much of Baker’s work is quiet to the point of prayer: his last novel, A Box of Matches, about a middle-aged man getting up every day before sunrise, reads like a prose poem to fire and dawn.) And although Baker is often interested in talk, and even wild talk, as Wieseltier correctly notes (Baker’s most famous novel, Vox, is about phone sex), he has this in common with most of the writers who ever lived.
Baker’s novels are largely obsessions with action versus paralysis, of both the political and the personal sort, and in his unusual explorations of this psychological mezzanine and classical theme (in The Fermata, the protagonist can in fact freeze others and stop time; in Room Temperature, an entire novel occurs while the protagonist rocks his baby to sleep; in his first novel, actually titled The Mezzanine, a torrential esprit d’escalier engenders a roaming book-length tracking of one man’s mind), he is something of an original, though one might be tempted to place him alongside the English novelist Geoff Dyer: both are the same age, both have published amusing, inward-looking tributes to another admired writer (Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage on D. H. Lawrence, Baker’s U and I on John Updike), and both use restless, unpredictable narratives to register the neurasthenic perils and pleasures of their own isolating hyperself-consciousness—and do so without any masculine vanity whatsoever. This, I daresay, makes them disarming and endearing literary mavericks in the heterosexual world. Perhaps one of their differences is that Baker seems seldom to leave the house (in A Box of Matches, a character airing a rug on the front porch railing is performing a gregarious public act) while the peripatetic Dyer—observing all-night raves in France (Paris Trance) or his own tears in his smeared fried eggs in Detroit (Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It)—seems never to stay home.
Baker’s wit and literary context must be borne in mind when considering his most recent novel, Checkpoint, a dialogue between two men discussing the pluses and minuses of assassinating the president. One of the men, Jay, ostensibly has a plan to do so, but his mutating renditions of it are so laughably harebrained—one includes a final greeting to Condoleezza Rice (“Stick to the piano, baby!”)—that most readers will come to realize Jay is less villainous than he is a composite of the various ways people give theatrical voice to moral indignation. His assassination fantasy is a mirror of the one the White House had first of Saddam Hussein and then of Osama bin Laden—a “decapitation” that even if realized would not have the political consequences he claims for it—just as it is perhaps mirrored in turn by Wieseltier’s own attempt to, well, assassinate Baker’s book (“This scummy little book” is Wieseltier’s own attention-grabbing opening).
Where does wild talk end, and something else more dangerous begin? Baker is only exploring this fictionally; Wieseltier, while committing his own wild talk in a nonfictional realm, may not actually understand this. He says of Baker’s creation of the would-be assassin, Jay, that strictly speaking Baker is not “inciting a crime,” though at novel’s end “it may be the president is really in danger,” seemingly forgetting that these are fictional characters and that in a novel even someone called “President Bush” remains a fictional character. When Wieseltier lectures his readers that “neither John Kerry nor John Edwards appears to live in the universe in which Checkpoint was set or in the universe in which Checkpoint was written,” an embarrassing misunderstanding of the nature of fiction is revealed. Wild talk indeed.
So one must remember that Baker is funny, that he writes about paralysis inflamed by inaction, that he is interested in wild, even crazy, mock-heroic talk, and that he, as an American writer, is living in some of the most devastating years of American political history. What does a novelist like this—witnessing the world and taking note of his own as well as others’ perceptions—write? Why a novel that takes the form of a two-person radio play in which a “demented bum” named Jay argues his suicidal-homicidal political mission—“This is the one thing I have to contribute”—to a friend named Ben, who may or may not actually believe him, but argues back nonetheless, even to the point of desperately quoting Dr. Seuss (“a person’s a person no matter how small”):
JAY: And you’ve taken up photography.
BEN: Yes.
JAY: It’s helpful to have a hobby. I have a hobby, too.
BEN: Jay, assassinating the president isn’t a hobby.
JAY: I’m sure not getting paid for it. It’s pro bono all the way….And what are you going to do with these tree pictures?
Checkpoint’s Jay is furious about the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, that “patchwork country,” and this foreign policy’s dishonoring of a people: “I want to say, ‘Wolfowitz, you fuckhead! You’re killing people! You’re not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country!’ ” and the triggering image for Jay’s fury is something he’s seen on the news, a fleeing Iraqi family, killed by American soldiers at a military checkpoint. What then takes over him is a citizen’s outrage intent on (or trying to seem intent on) shedding its powerlessness. First, using Ben and his tape recorder as a sounding board, he must wend his way through his many criticisms of the White House, from Rumsfeld’s fortune from NutraSweet, to the bankrupt American economy, to Lynne Cheney’s denigration of Eminem:
JAY: Lynne Cheney, this merchant of multinational MISERY, man. It’s staggering when you take time to think about it for more than twelve seconds. And here she’s all in a flusterment about the nasty lyrics of Eminem.
BEN: Eminem is no favorite of mine.
JAY: Well, no, he’s not Zappa. But that woman, I’m sorry to say, is the real obscenity.
BEN: Oh, Lynne Cheney did some good things when she was at the NEH. You’ve got to lighten up a little. She’s not a viper. She was just on the board of directors.
JAY: How could she be on the board of that company and look at herself in the mirror? How can she look at her husband in the mirror? Halliburton and Enron and all that. Enron wangling to profit from the pipeline across Afghanistan. It’s a sickening spectacle.
BEN: Do you think they look at each other in the mirror?
Although Jay may never “lighten up,” as Ben suggests, it is Baker’s sensibility to allow his book to do so, letting it go wherever it’s tempted; the narrative clowns around at intermittent intervals, bringing its own light to the dark, or the Cheneys to a mirror—the gallows humor that so often m
arbles grief and despair. “If what I do causes an upheaval,” says Jay, “okeydoke.”
Since now more than ever we live in a world of bomber-assassins who take their own lives along with the lives of others, their minds, from the outside, looking cracked with the determined, fantastical pageantry of misbegotten valor, Baker’s brief take on the workings of one such ostensible soul is as timely as fiction gets. It does not perhaps take us convincingly inside the suicidal part of such a person’s head, however—this part still feels dismissible as madness—but with the homicidal part he is much closer, and Jay is sometimes logical, even calm, in his arguments. “If you say, Go, men, launch the planes, start the bombing, shock and awe the living crap out of that ancient city—you are going to create assassins like me.” People want to make their lives meaningful in wicked times, just as writers want to make their novels meaningful, and Ben’s recommended alternatives—gentleness, love, photography, a puppy, copying out great books word for word into a notebook—however movingly simple or deeply believed or sweetly therapeutic, may not do the trick for everyone.