May 10, 2021 Issue

Adam Gopnik, in his absorbing “Peripheral Proust,” in this week’s issue, says that John Updike found in Proust “the only credible modern religious novelist.” He says that for Updike, Proust was “the last Christian poet.” Is this true? Updike loved Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In one of his finest essays, “Remembrance of Things Past Remembered” (included in his great 1976 collection Picked-Up Pieces), Updike wrote, 

Proust’s tendrilous sentences seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith. It was a revelation to me that words could entwine and curl so, yet keep a live crispness and the breath of utterance. I was dazzled by the witty similes – the vanished fresco, the book holding the known name – that wove art and nature into a single luminous fabric. This was not “better” writing, it was writing with a whole new nervous system.

That’s one of the most beautiful descriptions of writing I’ve ever read. Updike’s love of Proust was all about his style (“the dissecting delicacy of each sentence”). He says, memorably, “In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness.” Is that Christian? Maybe. Granted, Updike compared Remembrance of Things Past to the Bible, and called it “a work of consolation.” But I think it's the consolation of art, not God, that he was referring to. His love of Proust was sourced in those "tendrilous sentences." It’s the same for me.