Updike's Exquisite Word Paint (Contra Christine Smallwood)

Christine Smallwood, in her “State of Affairs” (Bookforum, Summer 2018), says of John Updike, “He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end?” If you have to ask that about Updike, chances are you’re not going to appreciate his art. For Updike, things are interesting in themselves. Like Dürer and Vermeer, artists he admired immensely, he describes the physical world in close avid detail: 

Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors.

The lilac leaves, flourishing, flowerless, had reached the height of Nancy’s window and, heart-shaped, brushed her screen.

Her brown eyes, gazing, each held in miniature the square skylight above them.

Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion.

He was sitting on the brittle grass, his feet in their papery slippers stinging. 

He called; she held still in answer, and appeared, closer approached, younger than he had remembered, smoother, more finely made – the silken skin translucent to her blood, the straight-boned nose faintly paler at the bridge, the brown irises warmed by gold and set tilted in the dainty shelving of her lids, quick lenses subtler than clouds, minutely shuttling as she spoke. 

These lines are all from Updike’s Couples (1968), a novel that Smallwood calls smug, pompous, and silly. She doesn’t get Updike’s writing. His art is the art of description. Claudia Roth Pierpont, in her “The Book of Laughter” (The New Yorker, October 7, 2013), calls him “a painter in words.” This seems exactly right.

September 11, 2017 Issue

Anthony Lane, reviewing the Dardenne brothers’ new film, The Unknown Girl, in this week’s issue, mocks the documentary plainness of their work. He writes,

Holy moly, a Dardenne car chase! Purists may flinch, but the rest of us are already looking forward to the brothers’ next film, Fast & Furious: Showdown in Seraing, in which only Vin Diesel and his matte-black Corvette can get the lonely single mother to the welfare office before it closes for lunch. ["Inquiring Minds"]

That line made me smile. It’s true that Dardenne movies lack visual extravagance. But that’s exactly what I like about them. They track the problems and troubles that afflict ordinary, yet particular individuals, and find the drama in that. As Christine Smallwood says, in her terrific “The In-Between World” (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012), a review of the Dardennes’ great The Kid with a Bike, “The Dardennes are interested in the everyday moral dramas of average people suffering and colliding and surviving within it.” That doesn’t mean their films are boring. Quite the opposite – they’re transfixing! Smallwood says of them, “These films are high-wire acts of dramatic irony.” I agree. I look forward to seeing The Unknown Girl.

July 22, 2013 Issue

Saul Bellow forged a brilliant style. But in the process, according to Greg Bellow’s Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir, he sacrificed a son. Was it worth it? James Wood’s absorbing “Sins of the Father,” in this week’s issue, says yes. Wood writes, “In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled.” Wood’s verdict is too harsh. It’s true that most future readers of such masterpieces as The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet will not likely bother to go behind the books to Bellow’s personal history. But those few who do will find the son’s memoir. It’s now part of the record. As Janet Malcolm said in respect of Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, “But Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty” (“A House of One’s Own,” in Malcolm’s great Forty-one False Starts).

Postscript: My two favorite sentences in this week’s issue: (1) “Overhead, banner planes towed news of extraordinary holiday mattress deals, while bored-looking lifeguards, with no one to save, lounged in their chairs” (John Seabrook, “The Beach Builders”); (2) “But the literary assessments are so wrongheaded as to give the book a migraine of unreliability” (James Wood, “Sins of the Father”).  

Second Postscript: I was pleased to find a piece by Christine Smallwood in this week’s issue. Her “The In-Between World,” a review of the Dardennes’ great The Kid with a Bike (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012), was one of last year’s highlights. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine.