Mr Congeniality (Sydney Morning Herald, 13/01/2008)

John Updike, Due Considerations: Essays and Criticisms
Hamish Hamilton; $59.95; 703pp

It is customary, when subjecting John Updike to scrutiny, to puff out one’s cheeks in stagy astonishment at his Herculean productivity. I do not intend to depart from this custom. Recently, I was given The Complete New Yorker – eight DVDs onto which has been scanned every issue of the eponymous magazine printed before 2007. Like the monocled, knickerbockered dandy who appears at the top of the contents page, Updike is ubiquitous: a search for ‘John Updike (Contributor)’ yields no fewer than 805 results! And bear in mind that Updike writes for many other magazines – about art for The New York Review of Books, about female sexuality for Mademoiselle, about cars for the Automotive Supplement of Architectural Digest.

The 805 New Yorker contributions include short stories, poems and parodies – all of them written while Updike was busy successfully attempting to establish himself as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists. But by far the largest minority of them are the reviews and literary articles collected under the heading ‘Books’. It is these adventures in literary journalism that form the bulk of his prose collections, of which Due Considerations (703 pages) is the sixth.

As with his previous collection, More Matter (1999), Due Considerations is principally of interest for what Updike has to say about fiction. Both the great and the not so great are appraised in a way that takes us beyond the merit of this or that literary work of art and into the nature of literature itself. On Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis: ‘Now, a reader undertaking a novel grants the writer a generous initial draft of suspended disbelief. DeLillo spends this advance payment as recklessly as his hero overinvests in loans against the yen.’ On Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days: ‘but generally his writing does what writing should do: it refreshes our sense of the world …’ Or here he is in a double review of the British novelist A. S. Byatt, reflecting on the historical novel:

The novel as the West knows it was born of Christendom, and the possibilities of good and evil, heroism and villainy are crucial to it. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a far more intricate, organic, passionately mimetic construct than The Pilgrim’s Progress, but both basically concern the protagonist’s effort to save her or his soul. Without souls to save, are mundane lives worth writing about? The historical novel steals strength and drama from the era of disturbed but pervasive faith in which the genre’s model classics were born.

Despite the obvious gulf in knowledge that exists between reader and reviewer in such instances, Updike is always a companionable writer and this geniality extends to the author reviewed. Indeed, it has been suggested by some that if Updike has a failing as a critic it relates to his constitutional niceness. Certainly, he cuts an affable figure in what often seems a needlessly haughty and (in America) macho field: a twinkly sage whose physical appearance – Danny Kaye meets the BFG – is a fair indication of his presence on the page. But this amiability is his strength, not a weakness. In his introduction to Picked-Up Pieces (1976), Updike gives his rules for reviewing – five specifics and ‘a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser [and] the presumption of certain possible joys of reading’. Here we have Updike’s approach in a nutshell. When he refers to A. S. Byatt as ‘one to whom the pleasures and rewards of reading are unquestionable’ he might as well be describing himself. Similarly, his comments on Frank Kermode, a literary critic of comparable gifts, will serve, with one very minor adjustment, as a natural conclusion to this review:

Decent devotion to literary merit and a humble and tenacious will to understand and explicate the best examples of it would not seem to be unattainable virtues, but this babbling, dumbed-down age makes them harder to attain than formerly, and their exponents rarer, with a touch now of the embattled heroic. [John Updike], for many of us, is a hero.